YEATS: SELECTED POEMS - Penguin Modern Classics

From his youth in the 1880s, a fertile dreamer rediscovering and remaking the Irish tradition and resisting the temptations of Victorianism, he grew into a great and innovative poet of the twentieth century, yet, unlike Pound or Eliot, he deliberately remained a Romantic. Much of his most vigorous verse on love, sex, Irish and international politics, the complexities of the occult and the 'sedentary toil' of poetry was produced in the years between his fiftieth birthday in 1915 and his death in 1939.

This new selection includes the final book from the unfairly neglected narrative poem The Wanderings of Oisin and a number of lyrics from Yeats's work as poetic dramatist, together with other short pieces which have not achieved canonical status. It breaks new ground by allowing the reader to engage with a dozen poems in alternative versions; in many other cases it provides significant variants, so that Yeats's struggle to revise his poetry and to 'remake' himself can he experienced with unusual immediacy.