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.
About the Author
William Butler Yeats (1865 to 1939) was an Irish poet and dramatist, a driving force of the Irish Literary Revival and a co-founder of the Abbey Theatre. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923 and is counted among the foremost figures of twentieth-century…
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Listen to The Poetry of W. B. Yeats Audiobook Free
Listen to The Poetry of W. B. Yeats by W. B. Yeats free online. The full audiobook (46 min, 21 chapters, read by Kazbek) streams free on this page.
The Poetry of W. B. Yeats (1908) is a public domain work.
| # | Chapter | Length | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | To some I have talked with by the fire. A dedication to a volume of early poems | 1:38 | |
| 2 | The song of the happy shepherd | 3:24 | |
| 3 | The sad shepherd | 2:14 | |
| 4 | The cloak, the boat, and the shoes | 1:06 | |
| 5 | Anashuya and Vijaya | 7:53 | |
| 6 | The Indian upon God | 2:06 | |
| 7 | The Indian to his love | 1:25 | |
| 8 | The falling of the leaves | 0:47 | |
| 9 | Ephemera | 1:55 | |
| 10 | The madness of King Goll | 4:26 | |
| 11 | The stolen child | 2:37 | |
| 12 | To an isle in the water | 0:50 | |
| 13 | Down by the Salley Gardens | 0:57 | |
| 14 | The meditation of the old fisherman | 1:17 | |
| 15 | The ballad of Father O'Hart | 2:07 | |
| 16 | The ballad of Moll Magee | 2:39 | |
| 17 | The ballad of the foxhunter | 2:38 | |
| 18 | The ballad of Father Gilligan | 2:27 | |
| 19 | The lamentation of the old pensioner | 0:47 | |
| 20 | The fiddler of Dooney | 1:04 | |
| 21 | The dedication to a book of stories selected from the Irish novelists | 2:04 |
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