The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats

About this book

A falcon circles above a troubled world; dancers move between myth and politics; an ageing poet searches for forms that might outlast his own body. W. B. Yeats makes private vision part of public poetry.

His collected poems range from early Celtic dreamscapes to the harder, unsettling language of later work. The occult systems he studied, especially his theory of historical cycles, appear beside love, Irish history and mortality. Even when the symbols resist easy explanation, the images have an extraordinary staying power.