Selected Poems

Selected Poems

Summary

W.B. Yeats's Selected Poems is edited with an introduction and notes by Timothy Webb in Penguin Modern Classics.

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 twentieth century. This selection of Yeats's work includes the final book from the unjustly neglected narrative poem The Wanderings of Oisin and a number of lyrics from Yeats's work as poetic dramatist. This edition breaks new ground by allowing the reader to engage with a dozen poems in alternative versions; in many other cases it provides significant variants, so that Yeats's struggle to revise his poetry can be experienced with unusual immediacy. It also includes explanatory and textual notes for each poem.

W B Yeats (1865-1939) was one of the great and innovative poets of the twentieth century. 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 fiftieth birthday in 1915 and his death in 1939.

If you enjoyed Selected Poems, you might like The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, also available in Penguin Classics.

'A compelling poetic presence ... together with Joyce, Yeats made modern Irish poetry possible'
Timothy Webb

About the author

William Yeats

William Butler Yeats was born in Dublin on 13 June 1865. He studied to become a painter, like his father, but abandoned that profession in 1886 in favour of literature. He was heavily involved in the movement for an Irish literary revival and founded The Irish Literary Theatre with Lady Gregory, becoming its chief playwright. Yeats' interest in Irish national and traditional myths and imagery can be seen in his early poetry, such as The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889), and he was also influenced by his enduring unrequited love for the young heiress Maude Gonne. In 1913 Yeats met the poet Ezra Pound and from that point his writing begins to move away from the earler Pre-Raphelite style towards modernism. Yeats married Georgie Hyde-Lees in 1917 and with the help of his wife, and informed by his interest in mysticism, he developed a system of 'automatic writing' which profoundly affected the poetry of his later years. Yeats served as a senator of the Irish Free State from 1922 to 1928 and received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. He died in the south of France in January 1939.
Learn More

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more