Throughout his long life, William Butler Yeats -- Irish writer and premier lyric poet in English in this century -- produced important works in every literary genre, works of astonishing range, energy, erudition, beauty, and skill. His early poetry is memorable and moving. His poems and plays of middle age address the human condition with language that has entered our vocabulary for cataclysmic personal and world events. The writings of his final years offer wisdom, courage, humor, and sheer technical virtuosity. T. S. Eliot pronounced Yeats "the greatest poet of our time -- certainly the greatest in this language, and so far as I am able to judge, in any language" and "one of the few whose history in the history of their own time, who are a part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them."

The Yeats Reader is the first single volume to encompass the full range of William Butler Yeats's talents. It presents over a hundred of Yeat's best-known poems, plus eight plays, a sampling of his prose tales, and excerpts form his published autobiographical and critical writings. Also included are selections from the memoirs left unpublished at his death and complete introductions written for the projected Scribner edition of his collected works. These are supplemented by unobtrusive annotation and a chronology of the life.

Yeats is a protean writer and thinker, and few writers so thoroughly reward a reader's efforts to essay the whole of their canon. This volume is an excellent place to begins that enterprise, to renew an old acquaintance with one of world literature's great voices, or to continue a lifelong interest in the phenomenon of literary genius.