Poetry can resemble incantation, but sometimes it also resembles conversation. Certain poems combine the two—the cadences of speech intertwined with the forms of song in a varying way that heightens ...

The earlier Sailing to Byzantium is better known, but Byzantium, dated 1930, is surely one of Yeats’s greatest poetic achievements. Although his occult and alchemical preoccupations, collected in that ...

November 2020 marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of one of the most famous and influential poems of the 20th century. It is titled “The Second Coming.” It was written in 1919 by the Irish ...

Why a third-person complaint directed at a bird most of us hear with gratitude and affection? The answer, of course, is to be found in the pain of lost love – or, more accurately, the memory of good ...

Jonathan Bate presents a series which examines historical events through the poetry they inspired. By WB Yeats. With the poet Theo Dorgan, novelist Anne Enright and historian Diarmuid Ferriter, ...

In the 150th anniversary year of the Irish poet, pick your favourite work News: Yeats honoured with worldwide celebrations Would you rather arise and go now, slouch towards Bethlehem, or seek to tell ...

I first heard WB Yeats’s poetry spoken aloud not by the reedy-voiced poet himself intoning on an early recording, or by a teacher at high school or a friend at university, but on an album that ...

An original copy of William Butler Yeats' Easter 1916, one of his most political poems, was sold Wednesday in Dublin for $11,400. The first-edition poem, one of three known copies to exist worldwide, ...

Mike Scott continues a decades-long love affair with the words of Irish poet WB Yeats on An Appointment with Mr. Yeats, an album of brilliant, mystical music worthy of Yeats’s immortal words. I bought ...