Where to Start with W. B. Yeats
W. B. Yeats was an Irish poet who reinvented himself so completely across his career that his early Celtic twilight verse and his fierce later work feel like the output of two different writers. He drew on Irish mythology, occult philosophy, and the political upheavals of his time to produce some of the most memorable poetry in the English language.
Start here
The Tower
W. B. Yeats · 400 pages · 1928 · Moderate
Themes: Irish identity, mythology, aging, beauty, mysticism
The Tower is the collection where Yeats became fully himself, the aging man in his tower, raging and wondering, writing poems that burn with intellectual and emotional intensity.
Why Start Here
Published when Yeats was in his sixties, The Tower contains some of the greatest poems in the English language: “Sailing to Byzantium,” “Leda and the Swan,” “Among School Children,” “The Tower” itself. These are poems about time, beauty, old age, and the persistence of the creative spirit, and they carry an urgency that his earlier, more decorative work rarely reaches.
If you try the early Yeats first and find it too soft, come here and you will find a completely different poet. If you love the early work, The Tower will expand what you thought he could do. Either way, this is the collection that secures his place among the immortals.
What to Expect
Dense, allusive poems that reward slow reading. References to Irish mythology, occult symbolism, and Yeats’s own idiosyncratic philosophical system (no need to master it, the emotional force comes through anyway). Some of the most memorable lines in English poetry, sitting inside poems that are more complex and strange than the excerpts suggest.