WB Yeats, Selected Poems

W.B. Yeats, 1865–1939, lived through ‘interesting times’. His life spanned the changes from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries, from British rule in Ireland to the establishment of an independant Irish Republic. As Louise Guinness describes in her introduction, this is all reflected in his verse — “And what verse too. Through it all, above it all and down the years the poetry sings. Yeats made the personal universal and nobody in the twentieth century wrote more beautifully and more lyrically about romantic love and the embittered heart; about patriotism and occultism and madness; about beauty and decay, age, death and immortality:

‘Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said
It was the dream itself enchanted me’”