The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (Wordsworth Poetry Library). This item is unavailable.The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (Wordsworth Poetry Library)

W. B. Yeats was Romantic and Modernist, mystical dreamer and leader of the Irish Literary Revival, Nobel prize-winner, dramatist and, above all, poet. He began writing with the intention of putting his ‘very self’ into his poems. T. S. Eliot, one of many who proclaimed the Irishman’s greatness, described him as ‘one of those few whose history is the history of their own time, who are part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them’. For anyone interested in the literature of the late nineteenth century and the twentieth century, Yeats’s work is essential. This volume gathers the full range of his published poetry, from the hauntingly beautiful early lyrics (by which he is still fondly remembered) to the magnificent later poems which put beyond question his status as major poet of modern times. Paradoxical, proud and passionate, Yeats speaks today as eloquently as ever.

Richard J. Finneran is general editor, with George Mills Harper, of The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats and the editor of Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies. He holds the Hodges Chair of Excellence at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and has published widely in the field of Anglo-Irish literature.