First Yeats
Poems by W. B. Yeats, 1889-1899
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 Work"s (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.
About the Author
William Butler Yeats was born was born in 1865 to John Butler Yeats, an artist, and Susan Pollexfen. His family belonged to the Church of Ireland. He spent his childhood in London, Dublin and Sligo. He trained as an artist, enrolling at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin in 1884. His lifelong interest in esoteric traditions found early expression in his membership of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn from 1890. Yeats espoused the cause of Irish national liberation, and he was the most significant figure in the Irish literary and dramatic revival, being founder-president of the Irish National Dramatic Society (1902), which was the basis for the Abbey Theatre (1904). In 1895 he achieved poetic recognition with "Poems". His early poetry followed Romantic and Victorian models, but in the early years of the twentieth century he developed a clearer and more direct style. His later poems are counted among the major achievements of modern poetry in English. After the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922, he became a senator. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. Yeats died in France in 1939.
