Yeats Selected Poetry

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) is one of the greatest English language poets, a status confirmed by the award of the 1923 Nobel Prize for Literature. At various times revolutionary patriot, upholder of an idealised aristocratic tradition, and Senator of the Irish Free State, Yeats was also a student of the occult and other arcana. An often obsessive lover, his poetry draws upon a rich vein of mystic melancholy andIrish mythology, and wide, eclectic reading in literature, history and philosophy. Standing at the crossroads between the exuberant romanticism of Blake and helley, and the dark realism of such modern masters as Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin and Seamus Heaney, Yeats's poetry chronicles the ceaseless, dedicated quest of a genius for the meanings of personal and public life, of historical change and of the hereafter.With a thoughtful and illuminating essay by Professor A. Norman Jeff ares, setting Yeats's work within a poetic, cultural and historic perspective, this selection is an indispensable introduction to a writer whose true and abiding significance is only now beginning to be fully understood.Edited with revised and updated ntroduction and notes by A. Norman Jeffares