Most Popular Books by William Butler YEATS

First published in 1928, The Tower was Yeats’s first collection published after receiving the Nobel Prize in 1923, and it is perhaps the major work that most cemented his reputation as one of the foremost literary figures of the twentieth century. The titular poem, ‘The Tower’, refers to Thoor Ballylee Castle, a Norman tower that Yeats purchased in 1917, and which formed the basis of the original cover design – evoked in the cover of this edition. The collection also includes some of his most inventive and profound work, and develops deep themes regarding life, love and myth. With explanatory notes, this edition seeks to bring the collection to a greater readership and to offer a more profound understanding of the great poet’s work.

Poetry.

First published in 1891, John Sherman and Dhoya was Yeats''s third separate publication. The stories were revised and reprinted in the 1908 Collected Works in Verse and Prose but not published again in Yeats''s lifetime. John Sherman, Yeats''s only completed attempt at realistic fiction, details the title character''s dilemma: He must choose between life in London and marriage to Margaret Leland, an English girl, and life in Ireland and marriage to a childhood sweetheart, Mary Carton. In addition to containing numerous autobiographical elements (for instance, the town of Ballah is modeled on Yeats''s Sligo), the novelette treats many of Yeats''s persistent themes, such as the debate between nationality and cosmopolitanism and the conflict between what he would later call the Self and the Anti-Self. In the end, Sherman reaffirms his Irish roots, and Margaret Leland''s affections are transferred to Sherman''s friend, the Reverend William Howard. Dhoya, a mythological tale set in the remote past, depicts a liasion between a mortal and a fairy, a motif that Yeats used in many other works. Describing the inevitable conflict between a world of perfection and the mortal world, the short story suggests that "only the changing, and moody, and angry, and weary can love." Well received by most contemporary reviewers, John Sherman and Dhoya are important both as works of fiction and as indications of the fundamental continuity of subject and theme in Yeats''s career. This edition offers an accurate text, an introduction, and explanatory notes.

Crossways - The rose - The wind among the the reeds - In the seven woods - The green helmet and other poems - Responsibilities - The wild swans at Coole - Michael Robartes and the dancer - The tower - The winding stair and other poems - Words for music perhaps - A woman young and old - A full moon in March - Last poems.

Beautiful early writings by one of the 20th century’s greatest poets on the 150th anniversary of his birth A Penguin Classic The poems, prose, and drama gathered in When You Are Old present a fresh portrait of the Nobel Prize–winning writer as a younger man: the 1890s aesthete who dressed as a dandy, collected Irish folklore, dabbled in magic, and wrote heartrending poems for his beloved, the beautiful, elusive Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne. Included here are such celebrated, lyrical poems as “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” and “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven,” as well as Yeats’s imaginative retellings of Irish fairytales—including his first major poem, “The Wanderings of Oisin,” based on a Celtic fable—and his critical writings, which offer a fascinating window onto his artistic theories. Through these enchanting works, readers will encounter Yeats as the mystical, lovelorn bard and Irish nationalist popular during his own lifetime. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Here is the complete, standard edition of the verse of Ireland''s greatest lyric poet, including poems from Yeats''s plays and essays--edited by internationally acclaimed Yeats scholar Richard J. Finneran. This top-selling reference has been steadily in demand since its original publication in 1989. Index.

This volume assembles all the known surviving drafts of Yeats''s final sequence of poems, arranged to provide a history of each poem''s composition. Previously overlooked or missequenced final drafts presented here will oblige textual revision of several canonical poems. Invaluable as an archive of Yeats''s revisions, this volume resolves many of the textual cruxes posed by Last Poems ever since its publication, while highlighting ambiguities that remain.

Yeats''s short fiction, rich in metaphor and symbolism, is preoccupied, like his poetry, with ''the war of spiritual with natural order''. Themes and figures recur, notably Hanrahan the Red, the last of Ireland''s Celtic singers, and several of Yeats''s restless heroes are seekers after forbidden knowledge, alchemists, lovers or mystics. This volume contains Yeats''s best short fiction. It includes his short novel, John Sherman, all the stories in The Secret Rose, and the ''companion'' stories ''The Tables of the Law'' and ''The Adoration of the Magi''.

The Wind Among the Reeds (1899) is a collection of poems and plays by W.B. Yeats. Containing many of the poet’s early important works, The Wind Among the Reeds provides a rich sampling of Yeats’ poems, illuminating his influence on the Celtic Twilight, a late-nineteenth century movement to revive the myths and traditions of Ancient Ireland, while charting his developing sense of the poet’s place in history and a changing world. “The Song of Wandering Aengus” dramatizes aesthetic and romantic longing. The poem follows a man with “a fire...in [his] head” who peels “a hazel wand,” hooks it with a berry, and catches himself “a little silver trout.” Satisfied, he returns home to light a fire and cook himself a meal of fresh fish when, suddenly, the trout transforms into “a glimmering girl / With apple blossom in her hair.” Haunted by her beauty, Aengus wanders the “hollow lands and hilly lands” in search of the girl, leaving his home and forsaking the promise of hard-earned comfort for the hope and hunger of vision . “The Song of the Old Mother,” a deceptively simple lyric reminiscent of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, is a brief meditation on the life of an elderly domestic worker. Rising at dawn, she ensures that “the seed of the fire flicker and glow,” preparing the home for the day ahead while “the young lie long and dream in their bed” with no sense of the nature of work. The Wind Among the Reeds, Yeats’ third collection of poems, introduces some of the poet’s most enduring characters and personas, including Michael Robartes and Red Hanrahan, who dramatize for poet and reader the moods and minds which move a creative spirit. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of W.B. Yeats’s The Wind Among the Reeds is a classic of Irish literature reimagined for modern readers.

The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume XIII: A Vision is part of a fourteen-volume series under the general editorship of eminent Yeats scholar George Bornstein and formerly the late Richard J. Finneran and George Mills Harper. One of the strangest works of literary modernism, A Vision is Yeats''s greatest occult work. Edited by Yeats scholars Catherine E. Paul and Margaret Mills Harper, the volume presents the "system" of philosophy, psychology, history, and the life of the soul that Yeats and his wife George (née Hyde Lees) received and created by means of mediumistic experiments from 1917 through the early 1920s. Yeats obsessively revised the book, and the revised 1937 version is much more widely available than its predecessor. The original 1925 version of A Vision, poetic, unpolished, masked in fiction, and close to the excitement of the automatic writing that the Yeatses believed to be its supernatural origin, is presented here in a scholarly edition for the first time. The text, minimally corrected to retain the sense of the original, is extensively annotated, with particular attention paid to the relationship between the published book and its complex genetic materials. Indispensable to an understanding of the poet''s late work and entrancing on its own merit, A Vision aims to be, all at once, a work of theoretical history, an esoteric philosophy, an aesthetic symbology, a psychological schema, and a sacred book. It is as difficult as it is essential reading for any student of Yeats.

A collection of forty-one early love poems by William Butler Yeates.

Reproduction of the original.

Contents: In the Seven Woods; Old Age of Queen Maeve; Baile and Aillinn; The Arrow; Folly of Being Comforted; Withering of the Boughs; Adam''s Curse; Song of Red Hanrahan; Old Men Admiring Themselves in the Water; Under the Moon; Players Ask for a Blessing on the Psalteries and Themselves; Rider From the North; On Baile''s Strand, A Play.

Reproduction of the original.

Supernatural tales are based upon Irish folklore, incidents related to Yeats by witnesses, and Yeats'' own experiences.

The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume IX: Early Articles and Reviews is part of a fourteen-volume series under the general editorship of eminent Yeats scholars Richard J. Finneran and George Mills Harper. This first complete edition includes virtually all of the Nobel laureate''s published work, in authoritative texts with extensive explanatory notes. Coedited by John P. Frayne and Madeleine Marchaterre, Early Articles and Reviews assembles the earliest examples of Yeats''s critical prose, from 1886 to the end of the century -- articles and reviews that were not collected into book form by the poet himself. Gathered together now, they show the earliest development of Yeats''s ideas on poetry, the role of literature, Irish literature, the formation of an Irish national theater, and the occult, as well as Yeats''s interaction with his contemporary writers. As seen here, Yeats''s vigorous activity as magazine critic and propagandist for the Irish literary cause belies the popular picture created by his poetry of the "Celtic Twilight" period, that of an idealistic dreamer in flight from the harsh realities of the practical world. This new volume adds four years'' worth of Yeats''s writings not included in a previous (1970) edition of his early articles and reviews. It also greatly expands the background notes and textual notes, bringing this compilation up to date with the busy world of Yeats scholarship over the last three decades. Early Articles and Reviews is an essential sourcebook illuminating Yeat''s reading, his influences, and his literary opinions about other poets and writers.

Reproduction of the original.

"Keynote This new annotated edition of Yeats''s indispensable, lifelong work of philosophy, A Vision (1937), is a revised explanation of the poet''s greatest occult work"--

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

Book Excerpt: I have founded societies with this aim, and was indeed founding one in Paris when I first met with J.M. Synge, and I have known what it is to be changed by that I would have changed, till I became argumentative and unmannerly, hating men even in daily life for their opinions. And though I was never convinced that the anatomies of last year''s leaves are a living forest, or thought a continual apologetic could do other than make the soul a vapour and the body a stone; or believed that literature can be made by anything but by what is still blind and dumb within ourselves, I have had to learn how hard in one who lives where forms of expression and habits of thought have been born, not for the pleasure of begetting but for the public good, is that purification from insincerity, vanity, malignity, arrogance, which is the discovery of style. But it became possible to live when I had learnt all I had not learnt in shaping words, in defending Synge against his enemies, and knew that rich energies, fine, turbulent orRead More