W. B Yeats

Poems (1920) is a collection of poems and plays by W.B. Yeats. Containing many of the poet's early important works, Poems illuminates Yeats' influence on the Celtic Twilight, a late-nineteenth century movement to revive the myths and traditions of Ancient Ireland. The collection opens with Yeats' verse drama The Countess Cathleen, which he dedicated to the actress and revolutionary Maud Gonne. Set during a period of famine in Ireland, The Countess...

It is now more than ten years since I met, for the last time, Michael Robartes, and for the first time and the last time his friends and fellow students; and witnessed his and their tragic end, and endured those strange experiences, which have changed me so that my writings have grown less popular and less intelligible, and driven me almost to the verge of taking the habit of St. Dominic. I had just published Rosa Alchemica, a little work on the Alchemists,...

At the end of the eighties my father and mother, my brother and sisters and myself, all newly arrived from Dublin, were settled in Bedford Park in a red-brick house with several wood mantlepieces copied from marble mantlepieces by the brothers Adam, a balcony, and a little garden shadowed by a great horse-chestnut tree. Years before we had lived there, when the crooked, ostentatiously picturesque streets, with great trees casting great shadows, had...

The Celtic Twilight (1893) is a collection of stories written and edited by W.B. Yeats. Compiled at the height of the Celtic Twilight, a movement to revive the myths and traditions of Ancient Ireland, The Celtic Twilight captures a wide range of stories, songs, poems, and firsthand accounts from artists and storytellers dedicated to the preservation of Irish culture. In "Belief and Unbelief," a story is shared about a village at the foot of Ben...

A youth has visions which eventually bring him into conflict with the Crown. He goes into a trance and experiences heavenly visions until two policemen arrive to arrest him. A clash ensues and the youth is shot and killed.

Includes the most accessible, best-known poems by W.B. Yeats from his early years that made the Nobel Prize winning writer and poet popular in his day. The volume will include all the major love poems written most notably for the brilliant yet elusive Irish revolutionary Maude Gonne. Recalling Yeats's 1890s fascination in aestheticism and the arts and crafts movement, selections will draw from the first published versions of poems from works such...