100 books like The Collected Poetry of William Butler Yeats

In this book, George Eliot’s novel of provincial life in 1830s England, nearly everyone marries the wrong person. Even the future happiness of its heroine, Dorothea, when she finally unites with her true love, Will, is questionable. And yet it stands for me, not only as one of the finest novels ever written but one of literature’s greatest romances.

Virginia Woolf famously wrote that it is a novel “for grown-up people.” I believe it is essential reading because it reflects real life where couples are mismatched, love goes unrequited, and ambitions are thwarted. It illuminates the small ways our better selves become compromised—and the larger gestures by which we are redeemed. As Eliot’s characters zigzag their way to each other, it is love that brings this redemption. How very romantic!

Dickens was a great intuitive psychologist, and The Tale of Two Cities shows some brilliant insights into human behavior during and after revolutions. The wonderful dreams of French society being built on justice and fairness came crashing down after the revolution. This is because people driven by opportunism and pathological hatred took over society. These ‘revolutionaries’ had an intense desire for vengeance and violent retribution–as well as gaining power for themselves. 

This is a feature of revolutions that we see again and again after the collapse of the old regime: unprincipled opportunists jumping to power. The direction of change becomes more radical. Inevitably, a lot of innocent people became victims during this post-revolution period, as did many innocent French people during what became known as the period of ‘Terror,’ when the guillotine rapidly killed thousands and thousands.

Dickens shows that in this terrifying post-revolution period, some individuals make great sacrifices… show more.

I include Robert Putnam’s book because, in a sense, it is about continuity rather than change, so it is about how things stay the same in some ways rather than revolutions that change things. What I particularly like about this book is Putnam’s discussion of inheritance, which he sees as being about far more than monetary wealth. Inheritance includes all the social networks, friends, connections, social knowledge, and everything else of value that your family passes on to you. Many inherited things are intangibles–like what you learn while sitting around as a child with your family, listening to grown-ups speak. 

Because inheritance is so vast, kids who are ‘poor’ are not just poor materially; they are poor because they lack the vast social knowledge and informal networks that rich kids inherit. This makes it far more difficult for poor kids to move up and make a success of themselves–so there… show more.

I am deeply passionate about Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace because I find that when I re-read it, I can always learn profound new lessons about human behavior. The setting of War and Peace is Russia in the period before, during, and after the Napoleonic Wars–roughly the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century. Both directly and indirectly, Tolstoy is dealing with the question of what happens after great revolutions.

France has experienced its great revolution and is now ruled by Emperor Napoleon. The talk is of spreading ‘revolutionary justice’ to the rest of Europe (and the world). In practice, Napoleon is making his own family members monarchs–the revolutionaries are the new aristocracy. Russia also experienced a kind of revolution because the French army's invasion of Mother Russia turned the Russian world upside down.

After invading Russia and capturing Moscow, the French military found themselves… show more.

I spent eighteen years writing the authorized biography of W.B. Yeats, and he haunts me still.

Though his poetry is world-famous, his autobiographies are less well known; yet they illuminate like nothing else the experience of living between Ireland and England and the contrast between a childhood in late-Victorian County Sligo and coming of age in the artistic circles of fin-de-siecle London.

At the end of his life, Yeats reflected on the tension between his Irish background and English conditioning and the contradictory feelings they inspired, writing, "My hatred tortures me with love, my love with hate." Elsewhere, he wrote that poetry comes out of "the struggle with ourselves," and his autobiographies show this to mesmerizing effect.

This play conveys the inner world of nationalism in both its romance and fanaticism.

Yeats’s play became a cult for young revolutionary nationalists in celebrating blood sacrifice for the nation. A young man joins an uprising on the eve of his wedding after meeting an old woman, Cathleen ni Houlihan (a folk name for Ireland), who pleads for his help to recover her green fields. By his sacrifice, Cathleen is transformed into a beautiful young woman with "the face of a queen." 

Yeats later agonised over this play and developed a more ambivalent attitude to nationalism. When young nationalists staged a sacrificial rebellion in 1916, he warned in his poem "Easter 1916" that "Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart." He asked in a later poem, "Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot?" 

Yeats, a mystic poet, travelled across Ireland in the late 1800s and early 1900s, asking country people if they’d ever seen fairies and taking down their stories. “I believe when I am in the mood that all nature is full of people whom we cannot see,” he wrote in an earlier book, The Celtic Twilight. “Even when I was a boy I could never walk in a wood without feeling that at any moment I might find before me somebody or something I had long looked for without knowing….” Yates believed the songs and stories "handed down among the cottages” were “Folk art [which]… because it has gathered into itself the simplest and most unforgettable thoughts of the generations… is the soil where all great art is rooted.”  His own poetry bears this out. 

The War Poets is a powerful and moving collection that, despite being about fighting and dying, somehow managed to teach and inspire me. For certain, it made me stop and think deeply about life, choices, and consequences. This little book shows the hearts and minds of soldier poets who went to war, and the ultimate self-discoveries they achieved. For such a small book, The War Poets tackles a big topic and goes deep beneath the surface. At times in my life, I have struggled to simply accept, and this collection of raw and honest verse has helped me push on through to the other side.

This quintessential Arthur Machen collection of thirteen of his most highly praised stories and short novels was my introduction to Arthur Machen, and like Rider Haggard’s work, affected me deeply, to the extent that I eventually needed to “soak up some Arthur Machan country” and flew to Wales (from California) for no other purpose.

Arthur Machen is known best for the exceptionally vivid, mind-numbingly creepy horror stories that he wrote in the late 1880s, which have hugely inspired Lovecraft, Stephen King, and T.E.D. Kline, among many others. Machen’s work is, nearly all of it, alchemical; that is, by some divine magic, he made mere words and sentences seem far more than the sum of their parts; when he strung together any eight words, they would always sound more charming than the same eight words strung together by any other author.  

In the 1980s and 1990s, Keith Holyoak and I collaborated on a series of articles and books about analogy, which is the underpinning of complex metaphors. His new book is a delightfully insightful discussion of metaphors in poetry, drawing not only on his deep knowledge of cognitive psychology but also on his experience as a highly published poet. Through analysis of great poems by Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and many others, he illuminates how metaphors contribute to beautiful poems and to creativity in general.