Penguin Modern Classics: Selected Poetry Of W B Yeats

Few have lived their ideas so passionately and nobly as W. B. Yeats in his love affairs, politics and poetry. From his youth in the 1880s, a fertile dreamer rediscovering and remaking the Irish tradition, he grew into a great and innovative poet of the 20th century. Yet, unlike Pound or Eliot, he deliberately remained a Romantic. Much of his most vigorous verse on love, sex, Irish and international politics, the complexities of the occult and the ‘sedentary toil’ of poetry was produced in the years between his 50th birthday in 1915 and his death in 1939. This selection includes the final book from the unjustly neglected narrative poem The Wanderings of Oisin and a number of lyrics from Yeat’s work as poetic dramatist, together with other short pieces which have yet to achieve canonical status.