Most Popular Books by William Butler Yeats

The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats includes all of the poems authorized by Yeats for inclusion in his standard canon. Breathtaking in range, it encompasses the entire arc of his career, from luminous reworkings of ancient Irish myths and legends to passionate meditations on the demands and rewards of youth and old age, from exquisite, ocasionally whimsical songs of love, nature, and art to somber and angry poems of life in a nation torn by war and uprising. In observing the development of rich and recurring images and themes over the course of his body of work, we can trace the quest of this century''s greatest poet to unite intellect and artistry in a single magnificent vision. Revised and corrected, this edition includes Yeats''s own notes on his poetry, complemented by explanatory notes from esteemed Yeats scholar Richard J. Finneran. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats is the most comprehensive edition of one of the world''s most beloved poets available.

From A to Z, the Penguin Drop Caps series collects 26 unique hardcovers—featuring cover art by Jessica Hische It all begins with a letter. Fall in love with Penguin Drop Caps, a new series of twenty-six collectible and hardcover editions, each with a type cover showcasing a gorgeously illustrated letter of the alphabet. In a design collaboration between Jessica Hische and Penguin Art Director Paul Buckley, the series features unique cover art by Hische, a superstar in the world of type design and illustration, whose work has appeared everywhere from Tiffany & Co. to Wes Anderson''s recent film Moonrise Kingdom to Penguin''s own bestsellers Committed and Rules of Civility. With exclusive designs that have never before appeared on Hische''s hugely popular Daily Drop Cap blog, the Penguin Drop Caps series debuted with an ''A'' for Jane Austen''s Pride and Prejudice, a ''B'' for Charlotte Brönte''s Jane Eyre, and a ''C'' for Willa Cather''s My Ántonia. It continues with more perennial classics, perfect to give as elegant gifts or to showcase on your own shelves. Y is for Yeats. A specially compiled edition for the Penguin Drop Caps series, When You Are Old will include the most accessible, best-known poems by W.B. Yeats from his early years that made the Nobel Prize winning writer and poet popular in his day. The volume will include all the major love poems written most notably for the brilliant yet elusive Irish revolutionary Maude Gonne. Recalling Yeats’s 1890s fascination in aestheticism and the arts and crafts movement, selections will draw from the first published versions of poems from works such as Crossways, The Rose, The Wind Among the Reeds, In the Seven Woods, The Green Helmet and Other Poems, Responsibilities, The Wild Swans at Coole, and Michael Robartes and the Dancer. A selection Irish myths and fairytales including “The Wanderings of Oisin,” a Celtic fable and his first major poem, represent his fascination with mysticism, spiritualism and the rich and imaginative heritage of his native land.

Poetry.

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.

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.

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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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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"Responsibilities and Other Poems" is a 1916 collection of poetry by Yeats. William Butler Yeats (13 June 1865 - 28 January 1939) was an Irish poet and one of the most prolific literary figures of the 20th-century. At the forefront of both the British and Irish literary movements, he co-founded the Abbey Theatre and was, along with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn and others, a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival. In his later life, Yeats also served as a Senator in Ireland. This fantastic volume is highly recommended for all lovers of poetry, and it is not to be missed by readers with an interest in the Irish Literary Revival. Contents include: "Responsibilities, 1912-1914", "Introductory Rhymes", "The Grey Rock", "The Two Kings", "To A Wealthy Man", "September 1913", "To a Friend whose Work has come to Nothing", "Paudeen", "To a Shade", "When Helen Lives", "The Attack on ''The Playboy of the West World", "The Three Beggars", "The Three Hermits", "Beggar to Beggar Cried", etc. Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. It is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially commissioned new biography of the author.

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

Reproduction of the original.

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.