About a week ago, I finished reading Selected Poems and Two Plays by William Butler Yeats, a poetry collection that I had been dipping into for over half a year. This was my first time reading a poetry book all the way through, and on the whole, it was a positive experience.
I loved getting the feel for one poet, reading through, one by one, a great number of his works. Although Yeats' style is not always my favourite (I didn't really enjoy the poems about Greek mythology, as I usually didn't understand them), I still found many poems that I enjoyed.The way I read this collection was (of course) not like the way I'd read a novel. The book sat on my bedside table over several months, and here and there I would pick it up, read one or two poems, and then put it down again. I didn't stop and think over each of them. I didn't annotate them or even try to understand them all. Sometimes I just read the poem from start to finish and moved on to the next one, if I wasn't interested in it. But then for other poems, I would stop, reread, look up definitions of words he used, think about it, read it again... Even if I didn't end up fully understanding these poems, I felt enriched just by thinking about them deeply for a moment, seeking to hear what Yeats was saying. I wrote down the titles of a number of those poems, hoping to go back to them one day, read them again, remember why I loved them.I want to say something about reading poetry in this way. Just immersing yourself into a poet like this, or poetry in general, can be so beneficial to you as a reader, as a writer, as a thinker, as a poet. I think that even if I had only truly enjoyed ten of the poems in this collection (which isn't true, I loved a lot of them!), it would still be a book worth reading, simply because of the poems I found that I did like. Just being able to come out of that book and say, 'I love Epherema by W.B. Yeats,' is a good feeling. The joy of reading this book was finding the types of poems that spoke to me, the ways of stringing together sentences that made me stop and think, the words I just couldn’t get out of my head.
I feel just a little more literary, a little more cultured, a little more absorbed in the world of good literature and writing and poetry after finishing this collection of W.B. Yeats. This was the first book of poetry I read, but it definitely won't be the last!
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