William Butler Yeats Poems

William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats (13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939) was an Irish poet and dramatist, and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival, and together with Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn founded the Abbey Theatre, and served as its chief during its early years. A pillar of the Irish literary establishment in his later years, Yeats was an Irish Senator for two terms. In 1923, he was awarded a 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". Yeats is generally considered one of the few writers whose greatest works were completed after being awarded the Nobel Prize; such works include The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1929). Yeats was educated in Dublin, but spent his childhood in Sligo. He studied poetry in his youth, and from an early age was fascinated by both Irish legends and the occult. These topics feature in the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the century. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1900, and these slowly paced and lyrical poems display debts to Edmund Spenser and Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as to the lyricism of the Pre-Raphaelite poets. From 1900, Yeats' poetry grew more physical and realistic renouncing the transcendentalism of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks and cyclical theories of life. Over the years Yeats adopted many different ideological positions, including, in the words of the critic Michael Valdez Moses, "those of radical nationalist, classical liberal, reactionary conservative and Nihilists".


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Poems

Poems Collection - poems, 2021 edition