As well as being one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century, William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) is the greatest lyric poet that Ireland has produced. He was the acknowledged leader of the Irish Literary Renaissance, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. His early lyrical poetry includes 'When You are Old', 'The Cloths of Heaven' and 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' but, unusually for a poet, Yeats's later work surpasses the poems of his youth. This volume contains all the poems from the 1933 edition of Collected Poems, the last anthology to be published in the poet's lifetime. With an Introduction by Dr Robert Mighall.

Author Biography

William Butler Yeats was born in 1865 in County Dublin. With his much-loved early poems such as 'The Stolen Child', and 'He Remembers Forgotten Beauty', he defined the Celtic Twilight mood of the late-Victorian period and led the Irish Literary Renaissance. Yet his style evolved constantly, and he is acknowledged as a major figure in literary modernism and twentieth-century European letters. T. S. Eliot described him as 'one of those few whose history is the history of their own time, who are part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them'. W. B. Yeats died in 1939.