The First Yeats Poems by W. B. Yeats, 1889–1899

W. B. Yeats (1865-1959) began writing poetry as a devotee of Blake, Shelley, the pre-Raphaelites, and of nineteenth-century Irish poets including James Clarence Mangan and Samuel Ferguson. By the end of his life, he had, as T. S. Eliot said, created a poetic language for the twentieth century. The First Years deepens our understanding of the making of that poetic imagination, reprinting the original texts of the poems from Yeats's three early collections, The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1899), The Countess of Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (1892), and The Wind Among the Reeds (1899). The poems were subsequently heavily revised or discarded. Among them are some of the best-loved poems in English-'The Lake Isle of Innisfree', 'He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven'-fresh and unfamiliar here in their original contexts, together with Yeats's lengthy notes which were drastically cut in the collected editions. Book jacket.

William Butler Yeats was one of the greatest poets and dramatists of the 20th century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. Edward Larrissy is a professor of poetry at Queen’s University in Belfast, where he plays an active role in the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry. He has published widely on poetry, especially on the work of Yeats. He is the author of Yeats the Poet: The Measures of Difference and the editor of W. B. Yeats, The Major Works.