The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
SynopsisPlot
Breathtaking in range, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats includes all of the poems authorized by Yeats for inclusion and encompasses the entire arc of his career: reworkings of ancient Irish myths and legends, meditations on youth and old age, whimsical songs of love, and somber poems of life in a nation torn by war and uprising.
Story
About this book
William Butler Yeats wrote poetry across several decades, and this edition gathers the poems he approved for publication. It follows his full career, from early pieces shaped by Irish myth and legend to later work concerned with old age, memory, and political upheaval. His earliest style drew on the Pre-Raphaelite movement, with its taste for beauty, symbolism, and medieval subjects.
His later poems moved toward a sparer, modernist manner, though he kept working in traditional verse forms rather than the free verse many contemporaries adopted. The book holds love songs, meditations on youth and age, and poems written against a background of war and uprising in Ireland. Yeats lived through the Easter Rising of 1916 and the founding of the Irish Free State.
The paperback is presented as the most comprehensive gathering of Yeats's authorized poems available in that format, so one long career sits inside a single volume. Yeats died in 1939, which sets the outer edge of the selection. Placing early folklore-based lyrics beside late political poems shows how much a poet's subjects and sound can change while the metre stays familiar.
