Poems

This is the voice that invented modern Ireland. Across five decades, Yeats transformed his country\'s ancient myths, violent history, and burning desires into language that still burns on the page. Here are the early luminous poems where swans drift through silver light and Countess Cathleen sells her soul for the poor, followed by the harder, starker work of a man who watched his nation tear itself apart in war and uprising. You will find the poems that defined the twentieth century: the terrifying prophecy of «The Second Coming,» the defiant cry of «Easter, 1916,» the bitter wisdom of «Sailing to Byzantium» where the poet, grown old in body but fierce in spirit, rejects the «monuments of unageing intellect» for the golden bird of eternal art. This collection traces one man\'s obsessive quest to forge intellect and emotion into something permanent, something that might outlast the blood and trouble of the century. Yeats is not easy comfort. He is the opposite: a poet who confronts age, death, and the collapse of civilizations and dares you to find beauty in the wreckage. This is the essential edition, the one Yeats himself authorized, with his own notes and scholarly apparatus. It contains everything: the love songs and the anger, the mysticism and the clear-eyed political rage, the roses and the Byzantium. It contains a life.