Poems (Collected)

W.B. Yeats, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923, is widely regarded as the greatest poet of the twentieth century in the English language. His collected poems encompass an extraordinary range—from the Celtic twilight lyricism of his early work to the fierce, visionary grandeur of late masterpieces such as 'The Second Coming' and 'Sailing to Byzantium.' Few poets have sustained such formal mastery and intellectual depth across so long and varied a career.

Yeats's poetry is inseparable from the turbulent history of Irish independence, especially the Easter Rising of 1916, which he memorialized in verse that transformed political catastrophe into mythic utterance. 'The Second Coming,' with its prophetic vision of historical collapse, has become the most widely quoted poem of the twentieth century, its imagery invoked in times of crisis across cultures and generations.