W. B Yeats

Born and educated in Dublin, Ireland, William Butler Yeats discovered early in his literary career a fascination with Irish folklore and the occult. Later awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923, Yeats produced a vast collection of stories, songs, and poetry of Ireland's historical and legendary past. These writings helped secure for Yeats recognition as a leading proponent of Irish nationalism and Irish cultural independence. Originally published...

The Wild Swans at Coole (1919) is a collection of poems by W.B. Yeats. Written while the poet was at the height of his career, The Wild Swans at Coole presents Yeats' typical concerns-aging, love, and the nature of art-against the backdrop of a decade of war. These poems, written during the First World War and the formative years of the Irish independence movement, reflect the harsh political and social realities of the era while remaining true to...

Born and educated in Dublin, Ireland, William Butler Yeats discovered early in his literary career a fascination with Irish folklore and the occult. Later awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923, Yeats produced a vast collection of stories, songs, and poetry of Ireland's historical and legendary past. This compilation includes a vast number of works, pieces that have earned Yeats the recognition as one of the greatest poet of his time. The...

Best known for his poetry, William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) was also a dedicated exponent of Irish folklore. Yeats took a particular interest in the tales' mythic and magical roots. The Celtic Twilight ventures into the eerie and puckish world of fairies, ghosts, and spirits. "This handful of dreams," as the author referred to it, first appeared in 1893, and its title refers to the pre-dawn hours, when the Druids performed their rituals.

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This compelling collection spans Yeats's career: from the poems of his early years, which display his interest in Irish myths and his hopeless passion for Irish patriot Maud Gonne, to the soaring, majestic poems of his old age. Works of precision, economy and sensuous, lyrical beauty, they include "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," "The Wild Swans at Coole," "Byzantium," and "Leda and the Swan."

"In the Seven Woods: Being Poems Chiefly of the Irish Heroic Age" is a 1903 collection of poetry by W. B. Yeats. It represents the first book of Yeats' "middle period", within which he moved away from his earlier Romantic ideals and pre-Raphaelite imagery, turning instead towards an obviously more space and anti-romantic position much like Walter Savage Landor. The poem in this collection most often included in anthologies, however, is "Adam's Curse",...

At times during Synge's last illness, Lady Gregory and I would speak of his work and always find some pleasure in the thought that unlike ourselves, who had made our experiments in public, he would leave to the world nothing to be wished away--nothing that was not beautiful or powerful in itself, or necessary as an expression of his life and thought. When he died we were in much anxiety, for a letter written before his last illness, and printed in...

One of the greatest poets of the century, Yeats drew upon Irish folklore and myth as inspiration for much of his early poetry. Mythic themes and others are masterfully explored in this rich selection of 134 poems published between 1889 and 1914. Included are such favorites as "Lake Isle of Innisfree," "When You Are Old," "Down by the Salley Gardens," "The Stolen Child," "Fergus and the Druid," "To the Rose upon the Rood of Time," "The Song of Wandering...

William Butler Yeats's close friend, Ezra Pound, exposed the playwright to the symbolic theatre genre of Japanese Noh drama, prompting him to write a series of four plays in that style. The final play in this series, which were first printed together in "Four Plays for Dancers", was "Calvary". With Ireland in the midst of a hunger-strike, the story of the self-sacrificing Christ was particularly relevant. In the story, Christ dreams of his passion,...

Wine comes in at the mouth And love comes in at the eye; That's all we shall know for truth Before we grow old and die. I lift the glass to my mouth, I look at you, and I sigh.