An original, yet lucid and accessible introduction to the often difficult poetry of W.B. Yeats. No poet in this century has shaped his work so directly out of reaction to the history of his times. Yeats's antithetical vision, his fascination with conflict, energy, turbulence and the bodiliness of being, his sense of poetry as a dramatic process, indicate how closely bound up are the stylistic and the thematic dimensions of his art. As a poet of carnality as much as of politics, Yeats is unexcelled. The aim of this book is to show what an exciting writer he is, to reveal the relevance and contemporaneity of his work, even in its more esoteric aspects, and to make its study less intimidating than it can sometimes seem.

This biography of Ireland's greatest poet does not simply tell the story of his life - it explains it.

A comprehensive and accessible introduction to the major themes of this important poet's life and career.

An exact facsimile of the 1933 first edition of W.B. Yeats’s The Winding Stair and Other Poems, a famously beautiful, elegant volume intended as a companion to The Tower—with an Introduction and notes by the eminent Yeats scholar George Bornstein. Published in 1933 when W.B. Yeats was sixty-eight, The Winding Stair and Other Poems is his longest stand-alone volume of verse. Previously unavailable as a single volume, this beautiful edition will appeal to both general readers and textual scholars. Featuring sixty-four poems from the late 1920s and early 1930s, among them such masterpieces as “Blood and the Moon,” “Byzantium,” the Coole Park poems, “Vacillation,” and two separately titled long sequences including the Crazy Jane poems and ending with the exquisite lyric “From the ‘Antigone,’” this edition also includes an Introduction and notes by celebrated Yeats scholar George Bornstein. These poems amply justify T. S. Eliot’s contention that Yeats was one of the few poets “whose history is the history of their own time, who are a part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them.”