Publisher's Synopsis
This one-volume selection of Yeats's work includes plays, criticism, and other prose writings as well as poems. As a result it offers a perspective on the connectedness of Yeats's literary output, showing how his aesthetic, spiritual, and political development was reflected in everything he wrote. W.B. Yeats was born in 1865, only 38 years after the death of William Blake, and died in 1939, the contemporary of Ezra Pound and James Joyce. His career spanned two centuries and this anthology represents the full range of his achievement, from the Romantic early poems of "Crossways" and the symbolist masterpiece "The Wind Among the Reeds" to "Last Poems". Myth and folk-tale influence both his poems and his plays, represented here by "Cathleen Ni Houlihan" and "Deirdre", among others. In his critical essays Yeats expounds his idiosyncratic magical symbolism and a selection of occult writings further explores the profound importance of the spirit world to his life and work. Political speeches, autobiographical writings, and a selection of letters complete the edition.
