Early Poems
Chapters (12)
Title Page
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Copyright Page
DOVER THRIFT EDITIONS
GENERAL EDITOR: STANLEY APPELBAUM
EDITOR OF THIS VOLUME: SHANE WELLER
Copyright
Bibliographical Note
This Dover edition, first published in 1993, contains all the lyric poems from the following W B. Yeats volumes: The Wind Among the Reeds (second edition), Elkin Mathews, London, 1899; In the Seven Woods: Being Poems Chiefly of the Irish Heroic Age, The Dun Emer Press, Dundrum, 1903; The Green Helmet and Other Poems, The Cuala Press, Churchtown, Dundrum, 1910; Poems, T. Fisher Unwin, London, 1912; and Responsibilities: Poems and a Play, The Cuala Press, Churchtown, Dundrum, 1914.
The Note, the footnotes and the alphabetical lists of titles and first lines were prepared specially for the present edition.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Yeats, W B. (William Butler), 1865—1939.
Early poems / William Butler Yeats.
p. cm.—(Dover thrift editions)
9780486159454
I. Title. II. Series.
PR5902.A3 1993
821’.8—dc20
93-21798
CIP
Note
THE NOBEL LAUREATE William Butler Yeats (1865—1939) is perhaps the greatest modern English-language poet, whose verse demonstrates both technical virtuosity and an extraordinary range (from love songs and ballads to meditations on time, history and the spiritual). Besides the lyric and narrative poems, he also wrote plays, essays, stories, autobiographies and philosophy. For his subject matter and vocabulary he drew heavily on Irish mythology, contemporary Irish history and mystical philosophy.
The present edition contains all the lyric poetry from Yeats’s first six collections of verse: Crossways (1889), The Rose (1893),1 The Wind Among the Reeds (1899), In the Seven Woods (1903), The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910) and Responsibilities (1914). Yeats devoted considerable energy throughout his career to revising poems; thus, the versions and the poem titles found here sometimes differ quite markedly from both earlier and later ones. (The editions reprinted are identified on the copyright page.) In addition, a few poems included under the above headings in The Collected Poems (1933) do not appear here in any form.
CROSSWAYS
“The stars are threshed, and the souls are threshed from their husks.”
WILLIAM BLAKE.
To A. E.