The Wild Swans at Coole
W. B. Yeats was in his fifties, weary and disappointed, when he counted fifty-nine swans on the lake at Coole Park and noticed that their hearts had not grown old while his had. The collection first appeared in 1917 and was enlarged two years later to forty-six poems. It holds elegies for Robert Gregory, shot down over Italy, the flat fatalism of “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death,” and poems in which the dreamy Celtic manner of his youth hardens into something spare and unsentimental. Ireland was moving toward revolution and Yeats was moving toward the voice of his great late work. This is the book where you can hear it arriving. Read it free in PDF and EPUB.
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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