The Greatest?

Is William Butler Yeats Number One? A young professor at Columbia, one of the best lecturers on Shakespeare I ever heard and a man whose opinions I took very seriously, once remarked to me that Yeats was “the best poet in English since Shakespeare.” This would mean—going chronologically—that he was better than Donne, Marvell, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, and T. S. Eliot. Today’s critical consensus on 20th-century poets in English looks something like this: Eliot and Yeats, tied for first; Frost second (not prolific enough after his earlier best stuff); Pound, Stevens, and Auden battling for third. (Of these six, four were American, one Irish, and only one English. For years English poets have resented the outsiders’ superiority.)

So the publication of the second and last volume of R. F. Foster’s Yeats biography, the whole amounting to some 1,500 pages, has been an eagerly awaited event. And everything about the work is first-rate: the scholarship, the literary criticism, Foster’s lucid and civilized style. It is hardly imaginable that there will be a successor.

About the Author

Jeffrey Hart

Jeffrey Hart is a contributor to National Review.

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Is William Butler Yeats Number One? A young professor at Columbia, one of the best lecturers on Shakespeare I ever heard and a man whose opinions I took very seriously, once remarked to me that Yeats was “the best poet in English since Shakespeare.” This would mean—going chronologically—that he was better than Donne, Marvell, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, and T. S. Eliot. Today’s critical consensus on 20th-century poets in English looks something like this: Eliot and Yeats, tied for first; Frost second (not prolific enough after his earlier best stuff); Pound, Stevens, and Auden battling for third. (Of these six, four were American, one Irish, and only one English. For years English poets have resented the outsiders’ superiority.)

So the publication of the second and last volume of R. F. Foster’s Yeats biography, the whole amounting to some 1,500 pages, has been an eagerly awaited event. And everything about the work is first-rate: the scholarship, the literary criticism, Foster’s lucid and civilized style. It is hardly imaginable that there will be a successor.