The Winding Stair by William Butler Yeats
Published 1933 · 178 pages · 8,000 words · about 9 hours at an average pace · Poetry
How hard is The Winding Stair to read?
The Winding Stair scores 71 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 72 out of 100
- Yeats arcane vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 75 out of 100
- Complex verse forms.
- Abstraction: 82 out of 100
- Age, history, vision.
- Information density: 70 out of 100
- Irish history, occult.
- Narrative indirection: 70 out of 100
- Lyric indirection.
- Symbolic density: 85 out of 100
- Tower, gyre, stair.
- Ironic distance: 58 out of 100
- Prophetic stance.
- Resolution withholding: 65 out of 100
- Visionary open.
- Structural complexity: 68 out of 100
- Sequence structure.
How The Winding Stair is regarded
The Winding Stair holds a literary regard score of 80 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.