The Poetry of W. B. Yeats

William Butler Yeats ranks among the greatest poets to write in English, and this volume gathers the verse that carried him from dreamy Celtic romance to hard, modern clarity. His early poems draw on Irish myth and folklore, full of fairies, wandering heroes, and the misty landscapes of Sligo. As Ireland moved toward independence, and as his own life filled with disappointment in love and politics, his voice grew spare, urgent, and strange. Poems such as ‘The Second Coming,’ ‘Sailing to Byzantium,’ and ‘Easter, 1916’ fuse private passion with public history and a personal mythology of masks and turning cycles. Few poets changed so completely while staying so unmistakably themselves. This free PDF and EPUB edition collects Yeats’s poetry for new readers.