The Poetry of W. B. Yeats

I approached this audiobook skeptical—could Yeats’ dense, archaic stanzas survive the leap to audio without feeling like a lecture? The answer is a resounding yes, thanks largely to the narrators’ fearlessness. Jordan Gallagher, with his rumbling Dublin accent, sounds like he’s mid-pint when he growls ‘An aged man is but a paltry thing’ in ‘Sailing to Byzantium,’ while Kelly O’Doherty’s silken delivery in ‘He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’ feels like moonlight on wet cobblestones. Ghizela Rowe’s evenhanded narration in ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’ provides a satisfying counterbalance, her pauses lingering just long enough to let Yeats’ melancholy settle into your ribs. The production is crisp, the pacing brisk without rushing, and the tracklist smartly curated—no recitations of ‘The Second Coming’ stretched to oblivion here. That said, the brevity works against it slightly. Eighty-two minutes can’t do full justice to a poet this sprawling; purists will mourn the omissions (where’s ‘Among School Children’?) and may crave deeper analysis. But as a concentrated, visceral dose of Yeats’ genius—one that respects the listener’s time—it’s a knockout. The only misstep? A few tracks could benefit from a heartbeat’s worth of silence between verses to let the imagery marinate. But even that’s quibbling: this is poetry as it should be experienced—heard, not dissected.