Collected Poems

It is universally agreed that Yeats became a great poet – Denis Donoghue * The Irish Times *“The Second Coming” is proof that a perfect poem can still go viral in a distinctly predigital way: that it’s become a part of the culture’s water supply – Nick Tabor * The Paris Review *

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.