The fundamental difference between rhetoric and poetry, according to Yeats, is that rhetoric is the expression of ones quarrels with others while poetry is the expression of ones quarrel with oneself. Through exquisite attention to outer and inner forms, Vendler explores the most inventive reaches of the poets mind.

This is a collection of previously published book reviews of modern poetry. The poets discussed include John Ashbery, Donald Davie, Allen Ginsberg, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Wallace Stevens.

Presents an examination of lyric form in the poetry of W. B. Yeats.

Vendler's masterful study of changes in style yields a new view of the interplay of moral, emotional, and intellectual forces in a poet's work. Throughout, Vendler reminds us that what distinguishes successful poetry is a mastery of language at all levels--including the rhythmic, the grammatical, and the graphic.

This book offers a new way of understanding the old conflict between iconophiles and iconoclasts by exploring the way images in poetry are used by one poet, W. B. Yeats, and his translator, Yves Bonnefoy. Using the phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion as a tool of interpretation, the book suggests further that translation is a significant act in which one entire theological world of a Protestant poet may become a completely different, Catholic one when the translation is performed by a culturally Catholic poet. For Bonnefoy, therefore, the act of translation becomes a profound act of hope.

Memories of the man are shared by Seamus Heaney, Christopher Rush and Colin Smythe, who compiles a bibliography of Jeffares’s work. Terence Brown, Neil Corcoran, Warwick Gould, Joseph M. Hassett, Phillip L. Marcus, Ann Saddlemyer, Ronald Schuchard, Deirdre Toomey and Helen Vendler offer essays on such topics as Yeats and the Colours of Poetry, Yeats’s Shakespeare, Yeats and Seamus Heaney, Lacrimae Rerum and Tragic Joy, Raftery’s work on Yeats’s Thoor Ballylee, Edmund Dulac’s portrait of Mrs George Yeats, The Tower as an anti-Modernist monument, with close studies of ‘Vacillation’, ‘Her Triumph’, and ‘The Cold Heaven’. Throughout, the essays are inflected with memories of Jeffares and his critical methods. The volume is rounded with further essays on A Vision by Neil Mann and Matthew de Forrest, while reviews of recent editions and studies are provided by Matthew Campbell, Wayne K. Chapman, Sandra Clark, Denis Donoghue, Nicholas Grene, Joseph M. Hassett, and K.P.S. Jochum. Yeats Annual is published by Open Book Publishers in association with the Institute of English Studies, University of London.