Product Description

This authoritative edition was first published in the acclaimed Oxford Authors series under the general editorship of Frank Kermode. It brings together a unique combination of Yeats's poetry and prose - all the major poems, complemented by plays, critical writings, and letters - to give the essence of his work and thinking. W. B. Yeats was born in 1865, only 38 years after the death of William Blake, and died in 1939, the contemporary of Ezra Pound and James Joyce. His career crossed two centuries, and this volume represents the full range of his achievement, from the Romantic early poems of Crossways and the symbolist masterpiece The Wind Among the Reeds to his last poems. Myth and folk-tale influence both his poems and his plays, represented here by Cathleen ni Houlihan and Deirdre among others. The importance of the spirit world to his life and work is evident in his critical essays and occult writings, and the anthology also contains political speeches, autobiographical writings, and a selection of his letters. This one-volume collection of poems and prose offers a unique perspective on the connectedness of Yeats's literary output, showing how his aesthetic, spiritual, and political development was reflected in everything he wrote.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #55458 in Books
• Published on: 2001-07-19
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 608 pages

Customer Reviews

Yeats - The Master of Irish Poetry
W. B Yeats led a troubled life - his marriage rejections by the love of his life Maud Gonne, and his subsequent romantic liasons are well documented in his work. The angst-ridden "No Second Troy," a beautiful love poem dedicated to Irish revolutionary Gonne, illustrates his passion and his ability to convey his emotions with the power of words.

His allusions to Greek mythology are also evident here, with the above-mentioned "No Second Troy," and the disturbing "Leda and the Swan" both containing references to the Classical Greek ideas.

Furthermore, his strong sense of Irish patriotism is also evident here, with poems such as "An Irish Airman Forsees His Death;" "Easter 1916;" and "Sixteen Dead Men" all revealing his passion for the Irish Home Rule cause. However it must be remembered that Yeats was not only a master poet, but also a wonderful playwright, and plays such as Cathleen Ni Houlihan, which helped to establish the Abbey Theatre in Dublin as the Irish national theatre, are other masterly productions of Yeats' work that are contained in this volume.

I cannot praise this book enough. There are many reasons why it is an amazing volume, but the quality of the literature, the way Yeats moulds his words to create such beautiful poetry, must be seen to be believed

Irish Literature
Yeats... what can I say? A terrible writer, a fraud whose plays are some of the worst ever written by anyone. His contribution to Irish literature is like that of Horatio Alger to American literature... at best. This would have been better had it been written by a troop of epileptic howler monkeys... what a business... impotent, nostalgic drivel by a man who Joyce and Beckett both despised. His work is tame, overwritten, pretentious, romantic (in the worst sense of the word) and, in fact, truly awful...