The collected poems of W.B. Yeats

Master craftsman and romantic visionary, William Butler Yeats played with all the masks of poet, playwright, philosopher, and politician in his search for an ideal of life where all masks were one. His poems, both witness to and metaphor of that life-long quest, are collected in this definitive edition, which incorporates his own final revisions, of published works from 1889 to his death in 1939.

As T. S. Eliot said: Yeats was the greatest poet of our time—"certainly the greatest in this language, and so far as I am able to judge, in any language." This collection reveals anew the extraordinary range of his work: the richly embroidered tapestries of ancient Irish bards and heroes, the exquisite songs on love, nature, and art, the highly personal insights into the motives and affairs of men, the passionate musings on youth and old age. The reader confronts not only the breadth of subject matter, but is drawn into the development of the marvelously accretive images of the rose, the gyre, and the tower which became ever more complex symbols of the poet’s search for artistic and intellectual union with the mysterious forces of life. And behind the poet’s mask, the man—his love for Ireland and its legends, his idealistic devotion to the cause of the Irish Revolution, his deep attachment to Maud Gonne.

In these poems crowded with symbol and image, sensuous music, and the play of intellect Yeats attains an almost mythic stature: a poet not simply of an age but, like Shakespeare, for all time.