Publisher details

Author: W.B.Yeats
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Genre: Poetry
Released: 04 January, 2016
ISBN: 9781847494412

Selected Poems

W.B.Yeats

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Synopsis

The present selection traces the development of Yeats' fully annotated verse, encompassing the poet's interest in Irish folklore and national identity, his engagement with the political situation of his day and the rich symbolism that is the hallmark of his work and a reflection of his lifelong fascination with the occult. It contains some of his best-known pieces, including the elegiac 'Easter 1916', the apocalyptic "The Second Coming" and the reflective and spiritual "Sailing to Byzantium". Often radical in content but always traditional in form, these poems are by turns startling and affecting, and never less than inspired. Taken together, they form an ideal introduction to the poetic career of one of Ireland's greatest literary figures.

About the author

W.B.Yeats

William Butler Yeats was born in 1865 in County Dublin. With his much-loved early poems such as The Stolen Child, and He Remembers Forgotten Beauty, he defined the Celtic Twilight mood of the late-Victorian period and led the Irish Literary Renaissance. Yet his style evolved constantly, and he is acknowledged as a major figure in literary modernism and twentieth-century European letters. T. S. Eliot described him as 'one of those few whose history is the history of their own time, who are part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them'. W. B. Yeats died in 1939.