From the publication of his first poems at the age of twenty, to his Nobel Prize in 1923, W. B. Yeats grew from an aspiring poet spellbound by the mystical life, to an Irish senator crafting modernist poetry around a complex system of symbolism. When You are Old: Early Poems and Fairy Tales returns to the younger Yeats, encountering him through Irish mythology and much-beloved poems like "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" and "He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven" that made him popular during his own lifetime. The poems, plays, and prose collected here present Yeats as the 1890s aesthete who dressed as a dandy, collected Irish folklore, dabbled in magic, and wrote beautiful poems for his beloved, steeped in the late-Victorian aesthetics of the symbolist and decadence movements, as well as early modernism. Approaching his early verse and tales with innocent candor as if reading Yeats for the first time, this volume proffers lush images of western Ireland full of faeries and otherworldly beings, framed within a profound fascination with aestheticism and the Arts and Crafts Movement, all giving expression to Yeats's early nationalist sympathies.

The poems, prose, and drama gathered in When You Are Old introduce a fresh portrait of the Nobel Prize-winning writer as a younger man- the 1890s aesthete and dandy who collected Irish folklore, dabbled in magic, and wrote heartrending poems for his beloved-the beautiful, elusive Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne.

About the Author
W B Yeats (1865 - 1939) is one of the great and innovative poets of the twentieth century. 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 producedin the years between his fiftieth birthday in 1915 and his death in 1939.

Reviews
By the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature



Book Information
ISBN 9780143107644
Author William Yeats
Format Paperback
Page Count 368
Imprint Penguin Classics
Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
Weight(grams) 262g
Dimensions(mm) 197mm * 130mm * 15mm