William Butler Yeats

This collection brings together all of W. B. Yeats's published prose writings on Irish folklore, legend and myth, with pieces on subjects including ghosts, kidnappers, fairies, ancient tribes, precious stones and Gaelic love songs. Through his researches on Irish folklore, Yeats attempted to create a movement in literature that was enriched by and rooted in a vital native tradition. In this volume Yeats's essays, introductions and sketches are presented chronologically, giving a clear picture of how his analysis developed, increasing in its depth and complexity in his quest to create an Ireland of the imagination.

This is a unique celebration of that most beautiful and self-possessed of creatures--the cat. More than 50 poems are included, reflecting every feline mood: the comic, the aristocratic, the lazy, the cunning, the fierce, the inscrutable. Lovers of cats and lovers of poetry will be delighted by the wide-ranging nature of the collection by poets such as T.S. Elliot, Ted Hughes, W.B. Yeats, William Wordsworth, Edward Lear and many others. One of the most attractive features of the book is the choice of pictures. A stunning selection of drawings and paintings by such artists and illustrators as Renoir, Manet, Picasso, Hogarth, Cruikshank and Lear add to the charm of the verse, making this a book to be treasured by cat lovers everywhere.

This varied and far-ranging volume contains a substantial selection from the work of one of our most distinguished poets. From his first book, A Crackling of Thorns, chosen by W.H. Auden as the 1958 volume in the Yale Series of Younger Poets, to his most recent, Harp Lake (1988), Selected Poetry provides an overview of the brilliant career in poetry celebrated by John Hollander's appointment as a MacArthur Fellow. It includes work from eleven volumes, almost all out of print, and is published simultaneously with a new collection, Tesserae and Other Poems. Harold Bloom has said of Hollander's last book, "It confirms his authentic eminence, comparable in my judgment to that of Merrill, Ashbery, Ammons and only a few others in his own generation of American poets." Selected Poetry replaces an earlier volume, Spectral Emanations, New and Selected Poems, published in 1978 and now out of print.

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 Yeats's best-known poems, plus eight plays, a sampling of his prose tales, and excerpts from 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.