John Unterecker, A Reader's Guide to William Butler Yeats (The Noonday Press, 1959)
Serious students of Yeats' poetry need go no further than this book if they want a thorough understanding of his work. In just under three hundred pages, Unterecker has managed to paint a reasonably detailed portrait of the poet and explicate nearly the entirety of his oeuvre. Unterecker achieves the former through a brief discussion of Yeats' life and the major themes, which defined not only how he lived, but also the words he committed to paper. These include Yeats' family and friends (his father, his Uncle George, Maude Gonne, and Olivia Shakespear, among others) and his fascination with psychology and the occult.
The bulk of Unterecker's book is a chronological study of each of Yeats' collected volumes of verse, beginning with The Wanderings of Oisin and concluding with the aptly named Last Poems. Unterecker delves deeply into the poems' recurring themes and symbols as he takes the major poems apart, nearly line by line (though more often verse by verse) in search of their obvious - and not so obvious - meanings. His grasp of the poems and Yeats' symbolism is very impressive, and so it should come as no surprise to find out he has taught classes on Yeats.
And therein is the problem with reading A Reader's Guide to Willian Butler Yeats. It is not meant as a casual read; it is, in fact, a textbook. Readers are meant to have copies of the collected poems at hand while reading through the text, and if they do not, easily three quarters of Unterecker's explanations will be lost, no matter the reader's love of Yeats. I can attest that lacking the poems will make this book nigh near impossible to read.
Also, in keeping with the textbook nature of the book, Unterecker has written in a style best suited for a classroom. It's not particularly straightforward, but tends to be dense, not just in structure, but in content, further complicating any attempt to read the book.
Therefore, if you seek this book out, keep this caveat in mind: it's a fine textbook, but a poor rainy day read.
