Riddled with Light: Metaphor in the Poetry of W.B. Yeats

In the Introduction to Mark Sanders’ Riddled with Light: Metaphor in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats, critic and poet Stephen C. Behrendt writes, “Sanders shows us Yeats anew, laboring on his visionary engine to produce a profoundly metaphoric poetry and a poetics that enfranchises and empowers his audience by making that audience both a respondent and, more important, an active co-creator whose role in both the making and the performing of Yeats’ art has for too long been insufficiently understood and appreciated. In setting this matter straight, Sanders does a service for us no less than for Yeats, and in the process he reminds us of the sheer, sweeping dynamism of Yeats’ unfailingly energetic and confrontational art.” In his critical works, Sanders has written extensively about Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, Karl Shapiro, regional poets from the Great Plains and—a writer loyal to locale, as well—William Butler Yeats. Indeed, in the seven essays that comprise Riddled with Light, Sanders explores the development of Yeats’ metaphorical concepts throughout the poet’s career, analysing the types of metaphors Yeats used while tracing the impact of specific metaphors on a poem’s language, rhythm, metrical and grammatical structures, and form. Individual chapters are devoted to the conceptual metaphors that unify Yeats’ work and provide readers with an overreaching arc to make a comprehensive reading of the poet’s work as well as a thorough understanding of his poetics.