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The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats
W. B. Yeats
The essential one-volume gathering of the poems of William Butler Yeats, the Irish poet many consider the greatest of the twentieth century. It carries the whole arc of his career: the dreamy, Celtic-twilight lyrics of the 1890s; the tougher, more public voice forged by Irish politics and the 1916 Rising; the visionary late masterpieces — 'Sailing to Byzantium,' 'The Second Coming,' 'Among School Children,' 'The Tower' — in which a mind facing age and a world in upheaval writes with unmatched intensity. Assembled by Macmillan as the standard 'definitive edition' incorporating Yeats's own final revisions, the book lets a reader watch a great poet remake himself across five decades. Musical, symbol-laden, and endlessly quotable, it is one of the indispensable books of modern poetry, and the natural place to begin, or to keep returning to, with Yeats.
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The author
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) was an Irish poet and dramatist, a founder of the Abbey Theatre, a senator of the Irish Free State, and winner of the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature. Steeped in Irish myth, the occult (the Golden Dawn), and his long, unrequited love for Maud Gonne, he transformed himself repeatedly, ending as one of the supreme lyric poets in English.
The book
The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats is the standard Macmillan gathering, its "definitive edition" (1949) built from the revisions Yeats corrected before his death. It organizes the poems by his own volume arrangements, preserving the shape he gave his life's work.
How it has aged
The poems are undimmed; if anything Yeats's stature has grown. His reputation does carry a genuine shadow, and honesty requires naming it: in his final years he flirted with authoritarian politics, briefly associating with Ireland's Blueshirt movement (for which he wrote marching songs he later disavowed), and his 1938 pamphlet On the Boiler endorsed eugenics, even voicing approval of restrictive population measures. Scholars debate how deep these late sympathies ran and how to weigh them, but they are documented and belong to the record. They sit uneasily beside — and do not cancel — the extraordinary poetry.
For more context
See R. F. Foster's two-volume biography and scholarship on Yeats's late politics.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- W. B. Yeats
- Publisher
- Macmillan
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Poetry
- Location
- Colorado