W.B. Yeats

Front Cover
Edward Larrissy
Oxford University Press, 1997 - Drama - 572 pages
This is the first one-volume selection of Yeats's work to include plays, criticism, and other prose writings alongside the poems. As a result it offers a unique perspective on the connectedness of Yeats's literary output, showing how his aesthetic, spiritual, and political development wasreflected 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 thesymbolist 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 writingsfurther 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.

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