Making the Void Fruitful

*Keane is a superb reader, observant of detail, sensitive to form, and always alert to the complex conversation through which a writer like Yeats finds his place in a tradition. *

Having written on Yeats before in the insightful and wide-ranging Yeats's Interactions with Tradition, Keane is learned in both the tradition of English poetry and the poetry of W. B. Yeats....We have yet to absorb what Yeats achieved in his poetry. Keane is helping us move towards an intelligent absorption in an age that is increasingly resistant to the truth of how the spiritual and the erotic, the sacred and the profane, continue to intersect....Keane places Yeats in the line of Donne, Dryden, Pope, Blake, Keats, and Shelley...When Keane does bring in Irish history or Irish writers like Seamus Heaney and Swift to bear on his argument, he does so with depth and insight....[In discussing Yeats's cryptic poem, 'Fragments',]. Keane ably shows that Yeats, the Post-Romantic Modernist, inverts Pope's celebration of the Newtonian worldview by making darkness rather than light the source of mystical knowledge.