W. B Yeats
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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...
4) Poems
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Poems (1920) is a collection of poems and plays by W.B. Yeats. Containing many of the poet's early important works, Poems illuminates Yeats' influence on the Celtic Twilight, a late-nineteenth century movement to revive the myths and traditions of Ancient Ireland.
The collection opens with Yeats' verse drama The Countess Cathleen, which he dedicated to the actress and revolutionary Maud Gonne. Set during a period of famine in Ireland, The Countess...
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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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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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Pub. Date
2023
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English
Description
Hanrahan, the hedge schoolmaster, a tall, strong, red-haired young man, came into the barn where some of the men of the village were sitting on Samhain Eve. It had been a dwelling-house, and when the man that owned it had built a better one, he had put the two rooms together, and kept it for a place to store one thing or another. There was a fire on the old hearth, and there were dip candles stuck in bottles, and there was a black quart bottle upon...
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Pub. Date
2023
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English
Description
At times during Synge's last illness, Lady Gregory and I would speak of his work and always find some pleasure in the thought that unlike ourselves, who had made our experiments in public, he would leave to the world nothing to be wished away--nothing that was not beautiful or powerful in itself, or necessary as an expression of his life and thought. When he died we were in much anxiety, for a letter written before his last illness, and printed in...
10) Collected Poems
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Pub. Date
2023
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English
Description
The Collected Poems of William Butler Yeats
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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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"The King's Threshold," first performed by the Irish National Theatre Society in 1903, referred to an Irish tradition that dates back to the 7th-8th centuries of commoners enforcing hunger strikes against people of higher status to whom they were indebted. It told the story of a bard who undergoes a hunger strike against the king.
16) Early Poems
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One of the greatest poets of the century, Yeats drew upon Irish folklore and myth as inspiration for much of his early poetry. Mythic themes and others are masterfully explored in this rich selection of 134 poems published between 1889 and 1914. Included are such favorites as "Lake Isle of Innisfree," "When You Are Old," "Down by the Salley Gardens," "The Stolen Child," "Fergus and the Druid," "To the Rose upon the Rood of Time," "The Song of Wandering...
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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....
18) 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...
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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...