The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats includes all of the poems authorized by Yeats for inclusion in his standard canon. Breathtaking in range, it encompasses the entire arc of his career, from luminous reworkings of ancient Irish myths and legends to passionate meditations on the demands and rewards of youth and old age, from exquisite, ocasionally whimsical songs of love, nature, and art to somber and angry poems of life in a nation torn by war and uprising. In observing the development of rich and recurring images and themes over the course of his body of work, we can trace the quest of this century's greatest poet to unite intellect and artistry in a single magnificent vision. Revised and corrected, this edition includes Yeats's own notes on his poetry, complemented by explanatory notes from esteemed Yeats scholar Richard J. Finneran. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats is the most comprehensive edition of one of the world's most beloved poets available.

In this multi-volume edition, the poetry of W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) is presented in full, with newly-established texts and detailed, wide-ranging commentary. Yeats began to write verse in the nineteenth century, and over time his own arrangements of poems repeatedly revised and rearranged both texts and canon. This edition of Yeats’s poetry presents all his verse, both published and unpublished, including a generous selection of textual variants from the many manuscript and printed sources. The edition also supplies the most extensive commentary on Yeats’s poetry to date, explaining specific references, and setting poems in their contexts; it also gives an account of the vast range of both literary and historical influences at work on the verse. The poems are presented in order of composition, and major revisions or rewritings of poems result in separate inclusions (in chronological sequence) for these writings as they were subsequently reconceived by the poet. In this second volume, the poems of Yeats’s early maturity emerge in the contexts of his engagement with Irish history and myth, along with nationalist politics; his increasing involvement with ritual magic and esoteric lore; and his turbulent, often unhappy, personal life. The poems of The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (1892) reveal a poet of intense narrative power and metaphorical resource, adept at transforming miscellaneous sources into haunting and original poems. A major revision of his earlier narrative, ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’, takes place in this decade when Yeats is also taken up with the composition of elaborate and uncanny symbolic lyrics, many of them resulting from his love for Maud Gonne, that are finally collected in The Wind Among the Reeds (1899). This edition makes it possible to trace in detail Yeats’s debts to folklore and magic, alongside his involved and often difficult private and public life, in poetry of exceptional complexity and power.

The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats includes all of the poems authorized by Yeats for inclusion in his standard canon. Breathtaking in range, it encompasses the entire arc of his career, from luminous reworkings of ancient Irish myths and legends to passionate meditations on the demands and rewards of youth and old age, from exquisite, ocasionally whimsical songs of love, nature, and art to somber and angry poems of life in a nation torn by war and uprising. In observing the development of rich and recurring images and themes over the course of his body of work, we can trace the quest of this century's greatest poet to unite intellect and artistry in a single magnificent vision. Revised and corrected, this edition includes Yeats's own notes on his poetry, complemented by explanatory notes from esteemed Yeats scholar Richard J. Finneran. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats is the most comprehensive edition of one of the world's most beloved poets available.

W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) began writing poetry as a devotee of Blake, Shelley, the pre-Raphaelites, and of nineteenth-century Irish poets including James Clarence Mangan and Samuel Ferguson. By the end of his life, he had, as T.S. Eliot said, created a poetic language for the twentieth century. The First Yeats deepens our understanding of the making of that poetic imagination, reprinting the original texts of Yeats's three early collections, The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1899), The Countess of Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (1892), and The Wind Among the Reeds (1899). The poems were subsequently heavily revised or discarded. Among them are some of the best-loved poems in English - 'The LakeIsle of Innisfree', 'He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven' - fresh and unfamiliar here in their original contexts, together with Yeats's lengthy notes which were drastically cut in the collected editions. This illuminating edition by Edward Larrissy, editor of W.B. Yeats, The Major Works (Oxford University Press, 2000), includes an introduction that clarifies the literary, historical and intellectual context of the poems, detailed notes, and a bibliography. It offers essential material for reading - and revaluing - one of the great modern poets.

This volume provides accurate texts of all the poems by Yeats published in his lifetime or scheduled for publication as of his death on January 28, 1939, including those omitted from earlier collections.

This compelling collection spans Yeats's career: from the poems of his early years, which display his interest in Irish myths and his hopeless passion for Irish patriot Maud Gonne, to the soaring, majestic poems of his old age. Works of precision, economy and sensuous, lyrical beauty, they include The Lake Isle of Innisfree, The Wild Swans at Coole, Byzantium, and Leda and the Swan.

Table of contents

Here is the complete, standard edition of the verse of Ireland's greatest lyric poet, including poems from Yeats's plays and essays--edited by internationally acclaimed Yeats scholar Richard J. Finneran. This top-selling reference has been steadily in demand since its original publication in 1989. Index.

In this multi-volume edition, the poetry of W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) is presented in full, with newly-established texts and detailed, wide-ranging commentary. Yeats began to write verse in the nineteenth century, and over time his own arrangements of poems repeatedly revised and rearranged both texts and canon. This edition of Yeats’s poetry presents all his verse, both published and unpublished, including a generous selection of textual variants from the many manuscript and printed sources. The edition also supplies the most extensive commentary on Yeats’s poetry to date, explaining specific references, and setting poems in their contexts; it also gives an account of the vast range of both literary and historical influences at work on the verse. The poems are presented in order of composition, and major revisions or rewritings of poems result in separate inclusions (in chronological sequence) for these writings as they were subsequently reconceived by the poet. This first volume collects Yeats’s poetry of the 1880s, from his ambitious and extensive juvenilia (including hitherto little-noticed dramatic poems) to his earliest published pieces, leading to his first substantial book of verse. The pastoral romance of classically-inflected early work like ‘The Island of Statues’ is succeeded in these years by the Irish mythic material that finds its largest canvas in the mini-epic ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’. In Yeats’s work through the 1880s, an adolescent poet’s youthful absorption in Romantic poetry is replaced by a commitment to esoteric religious speculation and Irish political nationalism. This edition allows readers to see Yeats’s emergence as a poet step by step in compelling detail in relation to his literary influences – including, significantly, the Anglo-Irish poetry of the nineteenth century. The commentary provides an extensive view of Yeats’s developing personal, cultural, and historical worlds as the poems gain in maturity and depth. From the first attempts at verse of a teenage boy to the fully accomplished writings of an original poet standing on the verge of popular success with poems such as ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, Yeats’s poetry is displayed here in unprecedented fullness and detail.