This brand new collection, impeccably edited by James Pethica, presents a comprehensive selection of Yeats's major contributions in poetry, drama, prose fiction, autobiography, and criticism.

A collection of over one hundred poems, plays, autobiographical and critical writings, and prose fiction by Irish author William Butler Yeats, drawn from throughout his entire career, with textual notes and a chronology of Yeats's life.

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

This authoritative edition was first published in the acclaimed Oxford Authors series under the general editorship of Frank Kermode. It brings together a unique combination of Yeats's poetry and prose - all the major poems, complemented by plays, critical writings, and letters - to give theessence of his work and thinking.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 crossed two centuries, and this volume represents the full range of his achievement, from the Romantic early poems of Crossways and thesymbolist masterpiece The Wind Among the Reeds to his last poems. Myth and folk-tale influence both his poems and his plays, represented here by Cathleen ni Houlihan and Deirdre among others. The importance of the spirit world to his life and work is evident in his critical essays and occultwritings, and the anthology also contains political speeches, autobiographical writings, and a selection of his letters.This one-volume collection of poems and prose offers a unique perspective on the connectedness of Yeats's literary output, showing how his aesthetic, spiritual, and political development was reflected in everything he wrote.

In Running to Paradise, M.L. Rosenthal, hailed by the Times Literary Supplement as "one of the most important critics of twentieth-century poetry," leads us through the lyric poetry and poetic drama of our century's greatest poet in English. His readings shed new, vivid light on Yeats's daring uses of tradition, his love poetry, and the way he faced the often tragic realities of revolution and civil war. Running to Paradise describes Yeats's whole effort--sometimes leavened by wild humor--to convey, with high poetic integrity, his passionate sense of his own life and of his chaotic era. Himself a noted poet, Rosenthal stresses Yeats's artistry and psychological candor. The book ranges from his early exquisite lyrical poems and folklore-rooted plays, through the tougher-minded, more confessional mature work (including the sublime achievement of The Tower), and then to the sometimes "mad" yet often brilliant tragic or comic writing of his last years. Quoting extensively from Yeats, Rosenthal charts the gathering force with which the poet confronted his major life-issues: his art's demands, his persistent but hopeless love for one woman, the complexities of marriage to another woman at age 52, and his distress during Ireland's "Troubles." Yeats's deep absorption in female sensibility, in the cycles of history and human thought, and in supernaturalism and "the dead" comes strongly into play as well.

Throughout his long life, William Butler Yeats -- Irish writer and premier lyric poet in English in this century -- produced important works in every literary genre, works of astonishing range, energy, erudition, beauty, and skill. His early poetry is memorable and moving. His poems and plays of middle age address the human condition with language that has entered our vocabulary for cataclysmic personal and world events. The writings of his final years offer wisdom, courage, humor, and sheer technical virtuosity. T. S. Eliot pronounced Yeats "the greatest poet of our time -- certainly the greatest in this language, and so far as I am able to judge, in any language" and "one of the few 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." The Yeats Reader is the most comprehensive single volume to display the full range of Yeats's talents. It presents more than one hundred and fifty of his best-known poems -- more than any other compendium -- plus eight plays, a sampling of his prose tales, and excerpts from his published autobiographical and critical writings. In addition, an appendix offers six early texts of poems that Yeats later revised. Also included are selections from the memoirs left unpublished at his death and complete introductions written for a projected collection that never came to fruition. These are supplemented by unobtrusive annotation and a chronology of the life. Yeats was a protean writer and thinker, and few writers so thoroughly reward a reader's efforts to essay the whole of their canon. This volume is an excellent place to begin that enterprise, to renew an old acquaintance with one of world literature's great voices, or to continue a lifelong interest in the phenomenon of literary genius.

Yeats, Philosophy, and the Occult collects seven new essays on aspects of Yeats's thought and reading, from ancient and modern philosophy and cosmological doctrines, mysticism and esoteric thought.