Most Popular Books by William Butler Yeats

An ethereal collection of long-lost fairy tales and folk stories from Ireland, collated and edited by one of the most sensational Irish poets, W. B. Yeats. This anthology of Irish myths and folklore was first published in 1892 after being carefully collated by W. B. Yeats. The prolific poet had a deep interest in the folkloric history of his country and dedicated part of his career to editing traditional fairy tales and translating them from the original Irish. Irish Fairy and Folk Tales is an illusive collection of beautiful and ghostly stories concerning fairies, changelings, witches, giants, the devil, and the supernatural. The tales featured in this volume are divided between the following sections: - The Trooping Fairies - Changelings - The Merrow - The Solitary Fairies - Ghosts - Witches, Fairy Doctors - T’yeer-Na-N-Oge - Saints, Priests - The Devil - Giants - Kings, Queens, Princesses, Earls, Robbers

Ideas of Good and Evil (1903) is a collection of wide-ranging essays by Irish poet W.B. Yeats. Writing on such subjects as the art of poetry, politics, and the occult, Yeats proves himself to be not only a master of verse and drama, but an immensely talented essayist and thorough scholar. “What is ‘Popular Poetry’?” reflects on a changing Irish literary landscape which has, over the course of Yeats’ career, established its own place in world literature apart from, and perhaps surpassing, its English counterpart. Juxtaposing “the poetry of the coteries, which presupposes the written tradition” and “the true poetry of the people, which presupposes the unwritten tradition,” Yeats argues that the spirit of Irish poetry depends on its unfaltering connection to the itinerant bards and storytellers whose gift for musicality and memory kept language alive for a widely illiterate people. In “Magic,” Yeats, a longtime member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, discusses his belief in the occult. Musing on the power of symbol to evoke memories, as well as the revelation of his past lives, Yeats provides personal anecdotes and secondhand accounts of magical occurrences and experiences, exposing a world secrets and hidden meaning for believers and the uninitiated alike. “The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry” is an academic essay in which Yeats argues that Shelley’s poems far surpass the radical ideologies of such figures as William Godwin. Ideas of Good and Evil showcases the diverse intellectual and spiritual interests of W.B. Yeats, an icon of Irish literature and one of the twentieth century’s leading poetic voices. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of W.B. Yeats’s Ideas of Good and Evil is a classic of Irish literature reimagined for modern readers.

"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"--

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 theessence 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 thesymbolist 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 occultwritings, 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.

The Celtic Twilight (1893) is a collection of stories written and edited by W.B. Yeats. Compiled at the height of the Celtic Twilight, a movement to revive the myths and traditions of Ancient Ireland, The Celtic Twilight captures a wide range of stories, songs, poems, and firsthand accounts from artists and storytellers dedicated to the preservation of Irish culture. In “Belief and Unbelief,” a story is shared about a village at the foot of Ben Bulben. One day, a young girl disappears while walking through a local field. Fearful that the faeries have gotten her, the townspeople conduct a search of the village, checking every home while burning ragweed and reciting spells to ward off the mischievous spirits. “Mortal Help” discusses the interdependence of humans and faeries, who require the presence of the living in order to play games in the physical world. As evidence, an old ditch digger tells a story from his youth, when he witnessed a group of faeries playing the game of hurling not far from the field where he was working. In “A Knight of the Sheep,” an old farmer faces off with the local tax collector, and both struggle to maintain respect for one another while trading shrewdly concealed insults. “The Devil” discusses several demonic sightings among Irish peasants, who claim to have met Lucifer by the side of the road by day and under the bed at night. The Celtic Twilight captures the collision of ancient and modern Ireland, preserving its legends while ensuring their mystery remains. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of W.B. Yeats’s The Celtic Twilight is a classic of Irish literature reimagined for modern readers.

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.

The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats, Vol. 4 (of 8) / The Hour-glass. Cathleen ni Houlihan. The Golden Helmet. / The Irish Dramatic Movement William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and dramatist, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years Yeats served as an Irish Senator for two terms. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival, and along with Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn founded the Abbey Theatre, serving as its chief during its early years. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for what the Nobel Committee described as "inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation." He was the first Irishman so honored. Yeats is generally considered one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize; such works include and nbsp;The Tower and nbsp;(1928) and and nbsp;The Winding Stair and Other Poems and nbsp;(1929).

Reproduction of the original.

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.

vThe Wind Among the Reeds is a classic collection of Irish poetry by William Butler Yeats. All things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old, The cry of a child by the roadway, the creak of a lumbering cart, The heavy steps of the ploughman, splashing the wintry mould, Are wronging your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart. William Butler Yeats (13 June 1865 - 28 January 1939) was an Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, he helped to found the Abbey Theatre, and in his later years served as an Irish Senator for two terms. Yeats was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival along with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn and others. He was born in Sandymount, Ireland and educated there and in London. He spent childhood holidays in County Sligo and studied poetry from an early age when he became fascinated by Irish legends and the occult. These topics feature in the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the 20th century. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and its slow-paced and lyrical poems display Yeats''s debts to Edmund Spenser, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the poets of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. From 1900, his poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life. In 1923, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Autobiographies is made up of six autobiographical works that Yeats published in the mid 1930s. Together, they provide a fascinating insight into the first 58 years of his life. The work provides memories of his early childhood, through to his experience of winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. The volume contains explanatory notes and previously unpublished passages from candidly explicit first drafts.

This collection is made up of stories told to Yeats by Hanrahan, the Hedge school master, a tall, strong, red-haired young man. The whole collection is about Hanrahan''s journeys around Ireland.

From reviews of The Cornell Yeats series: "For students of Yeats the whole series is bound to become an essential reference source and a stimulus to important critical re-readings of Yeats''s major works. In a wider context, the series will also provide an extraordinary and perhaps unique insight into the creative process of a great artists."-Irish Literary Supplement "I consider the Cornell Yeats one of the most important scholarly projects of our time."-A. Walton Litz, Princeton University, coeditor of The Collected Poems of William Carols Williams and Personae: The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound "The most ambitious of the many important projects in current studies of Yeats and perhaps of modern poetry generally. . . . The list of both general and series editors, as well as prospective preparers of individual volumes, reads like a Who''s Who of Yeats textual studies in North America. Further, the project carries the blessing of Yeats''s heirs and bespeaks an ongoing commitment from a major university press. . . . The series will inevitably engender critical studies based on a more solid footing than those of any other modern poet. . . . Its volumes will be consulted long after gyres of currently fashionable theory have run on."-Yeats Annual (1983) This is the second of two volumes containing transcriptions and in many cases facsimiles of all surviving manuscripts of the poetry that Yeats had published by 1895, together with the later revisions of that poetry.

William Butler Yeats (13 June 1865 - 28 January 1939) was an Irish poet, dramatist, prose writer and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. A pillar of the Irish literary establishment, he helped to found the Abbey Theatre, and in his later years served two terms as a Senator of the Irish Free State. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival along with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn and others. Yeats was born in Sandymount, Ireland, and educated there and in London. He spent childhood holidays in County Sligo and studied poetry from an early age, when he became fascinated by Irish legends and the occult.

I swayed upon the gaudy stern The butt end of a steering oar, And everywhere that I could turn Men ran upon the shore. And though I would have hushed the crowd There was no mother''s son but said, "What is the figure in a shroud Upon a gaudy bed?"

The Secret Rose (1897) is a collection of poems by W.B. Yeats. Written in response to demands that the poet write "a really national poem or romance," The Secret Rose exhibits Yeats'' devotion to personal mythology and occult orders, and is a brilliant display of symbolism by one of Irish literature''s premier poets. "To the Secret Rose" opens the collection. The poem, inspired by Yeats'' membership in the Rosicrucian Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, uses symbolism to evoke religion, myth, and history. The "Far off, most secret, and inviolate Rose" is an image of utopian longing, an ideal moment the poet awaits, envisions, and longs for. "The Crucifixion of the Outcast" is a parable in which a wandering bard is led by Christian brothers to his execution. As his cross is set in the earth, he offers a portion of his last meal to the beggars who have gathered to watch. When he is nailed to the cross, however, he finds that mercy without humility is a seed that cannot grow. In "The Curse of the Fires and of the Shadows," Puritan soldiers storm an abbey and attack a group of friars. Before he dies, the abbot raises the cross upon the altar, and promises divine vengeance. Immediately afterward, the soldiers are told that two messengers have escaped on horseback to warn and gather the people for a counterattack. The Secret Rose explores themes of faith and persecution while illuminating the proximity of life and myth for a poet whose subject is the soul. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of W.B. Yeats''s The Secret Rose is a classic of Irish literature reimagined for modern readers.