The Wind Among the Reeds
1899
Here is Yeats before he became Yeats - or rather, Yeats discovering the voice that would make him the twentieth century's greatest lyric poet. Published in 1899, these thirty-seven poems crackle with the ancient magic of Ireland: the sidhe dance in moonlit woods, the god Aengus sighs for unreachable love, and Hanrahan roams the countryside drunk on longing. This is poetry steeped in Celtic twilight and obsessive desire, where landscape becomes feeling and feeling becomes ritual. Yeats called it 'a book of short lyrics Irish & personal' - but what personal sorrow, what private devastation, fuels these verses. The love poems here are oblique and fierce, full of bitter thoughts and the lake of the marsh. Reading them feels like overhearing someone pray to gods most people have forgotten. Richard Ellmann called this the book where 'Yeats set the method for the modern movement' - the moment when ancient material became unmistakably modern art.
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