W. B Yeats
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The Celtic Twilight (1893) is a collection of stories written and edited by W.B. Yeats. Compiled at the height of the Celtic Twilight, a movement to revive the myths and traditions of Ancient Ireland, The Celtic Twilight captures a wide range of stories, songs, poems, and firsthand accounts from artists and storytellers dedicated to the preservation of Irish culture.
In "Belief and Unbelief," a story is shared about a village at the foot of Ben...
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The tales collected for Irish Fairy and Folk Tales all are reprinted from nineteenth-century sources, but they date back much further, to a time when they were part of a centuries-old oral tradition of storytelling and had yet to be committed to the printed page. These are stories that passed down through the ages virtually unaltered in their telling. To those who told and listened to them, they expressed something fundamental about Irish culture...
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The Countess Cathleen (1892) is a verse drama by W.B. Yeats. Dedicated to Maud Gonne, an actress and revolutionary whom Yeats unsuccessfully courted for years, The Countess Cathleen underwent several editions before being performed in its final version at Dublin's Abbey Theatre in 1911.
Based on an Irish legend, the play, set during a period of intense famine, follows a land-owning Countess who decides to sacrifice her wealth and property in order...
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Ideas of Good and Evil (1903) is a collection of wide-ranging essays by Irish poet W.B. Yeats. Writing on such subjects as the art of poetry, politics, and the occult, Yeats proves himself to be not only a master of verse and drama, but an immensely talented essayist and thorough scholar.
"What is 'Popular Poetry'?" reflects on a changing Irish literary landscape which has, over the course of Yeats' career, established its own place in world literature...
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Best known for his poetry, William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) was also a dedicated exponent of Irish folklore. Yeats took a particular interest in the tales' mythic and magical roots. The Celtic Twilight ventures into the eerie and puckish world of fairies, ghosts, and spirits. "This handful of dreams," as the author referred to it, first appeared in 1893, and its title refers to the pre-dawn hours, when the Druids performed their rituals. It consists...
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Compiled at the height of the Celtic Twilight, a movement to revive the myths and traditions of Ancient Ireland, “Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry” captures a wide range of stories, songs, poems, and firsthand accounts from artists and storytellers dedicated to the preservation of Irish culture.
In "Frank Martin and the Fairies," a sickly man discusses the presence of dozens of fairies inside his weaving shop. When a child in his village...
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Born and educated in Dublin, Ireland, William Butler Yeats discovered early in his literary career a fascination with Irish folklore and the occult. Later awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923, Yeats produced a vast collection of stories, songs, and poetry of Ireland's historical and legendary past. This compilation includes a vast number of works, pieces that have earned Yeats the recognition as one of the greatest poet of his time. The...
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"The Land of Heart's Desire," one of Yeats best and most well-known works. The play describes an encounter between a fairy child and newlyweds Shawn and Bridget Bruin, and explores themes of mysticism and the temporary nature of life. Yeats felt an internal struggle with the contradictions he felt in his nature and in life, and spent much of his life seeking out a philosophical system to resolve this conflict.
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The Wild Swans at Coole (1919) is a collection of poems by W.B. Yeats. Written while the poet was at the height of his career, The Wild Swans at Coole presents Yeats' typical concerns-aging, love, and the nature of art-against the backdrop of a decade of war. These poems, written during the First World War and the formative years of the Irish independence movement, reflect the harsh political and social realities of the era while remaining true to...
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This compelling collection spans Yeats's career: from the poems of his early years, which display his interest in Irish myths and his hopeless passion for Irish patriot Maud Gonne, to the soaring, majestic poems of his old age. Works of precision, economy and sensuous, lyrical beauty, they include "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," "The Wild Swans at Coole," "Byzantium," and "Leda and the Swan."
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I have found in an old diary a quotation from Stephane Mallarmé, saying that the trembling of the veil of the Temple troubled his epoch. As those words were still true, during the years of my life described in this book, I have chosen The Trembling of the Veil for its title. Except in one or two trivial details, where I have the warrant of old friendship, I have not, without permission, quoted conversation or described occurrence from the private...
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When I wrote the essay on Edmund Spenser the company of Irish players who have now their stage at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin had been founded, but gave as yet few performances in a twelvemonth. I could let my thought stray where it would, and even give a couple of summers to The Faerie Queene; while for some ten years now I have written little verse and no prose that did not arise out of some need of those players or some thought suggested by their...
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If you have revisited the town, thin Shade,
Whether to look upon your monument
(I wonder if the builder has been paid)
Or happier thoughted when the day is spent
To drink of that salt breath out of the sea
When grey gulls flit about instead of men,
And the gaunt houses put on majesty:
Let these content you and be gone again;
For they are at their old tricks yet.
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"The Hour Glass," appeared on stage as early as 1902, and underwent many revisions by its final version in 1922. This edition contains the prose version of that play. The story presents a Fool, a Wise Man and an Angel who sort through questions of faith, doubt and the Wise Man's unrelenting rationalism. In this edition we have Yeats' prose version of the play.
17) The Green Helmet
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Yeats produced a series of plays based on the legendary Irish hero Cuchulain, a tale that dates from the ninth or tenth century. "The Green Helmet" describes Cuchulain's return from battle, when he discovers that a friend has become indebted to the Red man for a very unusual item, a head. Written in the Noh tradition, this dramatic play marks a period of significant literary and political change for Yeats.
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"On Baile's Strand" was first performed here in 1904, as part of one of the inaugural productions. The short play is the earliest of five that Yeats wrote about the legendary Irish hero Cuchulain, a tale that dates from the ninth or tenth century. Cuchulain is being threatened by the Scottish warrior queen Aoife, who has sent her son to kill the hero. Cuchulain has sworn allegiance to King Conchubar, who orders the soldier to fight the Scottish foe....
19) The Pot of Broth
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In 1899, Yeats helped found the Irish National Theatre Society, which later became the famous Abbey Theatre of Dublin. He and Lady Augusta Gregory, another of the theatre's founders, collaborated on a few short plays during those first experimental years at the theatre. One such play, "The Pot of Broth", is a "peasant" farce that tells the story of a gullible peasant woman, convinced by a tramp that dropping a magic stone into hot water will make...
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William Butler Yeats was prompted to write "At the Hawk's Well" in 1916, after his close friend, Ezra Pound, exposed him to the symbolic theatre genre of Japanese Noh drama. The play, based on the Cuchulain legends of Irish mythology, uses Japanese-style masks and very simple sets to achieve an abstract, stylized form. The story is set by a dried up well on a barren mountainside, guarded constantly by a hawk-woman, and watched diligently by an old...