W. B. Yeats wrote poetry, drama and prose that move from Irish folklore and dreamlike early lyrics towards harder political, historical and symbolic work. The Lake Isle of Innisfree and early collections draw on landscape, legend and a desire for escape, while Easter 1916 and later poems confront Irish revolution, public violence and the difficulty of judging political sacrifice. The Second Coming uses a private symbolic system to imagine historical breakdown, and Sailing to Byzantium turns ageing into a meditation on art and permanence. Yeats's style ranges from musical simplicity to dense mythology, but recurring concerns with Ireland, occult symbolism, ageing and artistic transformation connect the phases of his career. His work fits Irish poetry, symbolism and early modernism, with readers of Seamus Heaney and T. S. Eliot finding different but important continuations of questions Yeats helped bring into twentieth-century poetry. Read more Less
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