J.M. Cohen wrote that Yeats was “the greatest figure in English poetry since the death of Tennyson”, and Ezra Pound, who once went to Yeats to learn how to write poetry, wrote about him : “I dare say ... that up to date no one has shown any disposition to supersede him as the best poet in England or any likelihood of doing so for some time...” Yeats is a very complex and difficult poet, because there is in him a curious intermixture of romanticism, realism, mythology, supernaturalism, magic, ocultism, automatic writing, nationalism, ‘private philosophy’, and even prejudices. His poems are very compact, allowing no elaborations, and leaving gaps for the reader to imaginatively fill them up, and thus making them more difficult. Great explicators and commentators have, of course, come forward, but they themselves, sometimes, are either difficult or not enough. Therefore, the one single objective of this book is to introduce the poet to the general reader in an easy manner. To give an idea of the poet, as many as forty-one poems, selected from his four stages of poetic development, have been explained (and all those poems have been quoted in full). Yeats had also a métier for drama, and had been a pioneer of One Act Plays, and wrote no fewer than thirty plays. And so Yeats has also been discussed as a dramatist, and, in addition, eight of his plays have been discussed at some length.

Table of Contents:
LIFE AND WORKS THE AGE OF YEATS, THE GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE POET YEATS'S PHILOSOPHY AND PSYCHOLOGY YEATS'S THEORY OF POETRY FORTY-ONE SELECTED POEMS Crossways—1889 The Song of the Happy Shepherd Anashuya and Vijaya The Stolen Child The Indian Upon God The Ballad of Moll Magee The Rose—1893 Cuchulain's Fight with the Sea The Lake Isle of Innisfree When You are Old To Ireland in the Coming Times The Wind Among the Reeds —1899 The Lover Tells of the Rose in his Heart The Song of Wandering Aengus In the Seven Woods — 1904 The Folly of Being Comforted Adam's Curse The Green Helmet and Other Poems —1910 No Second Troy The Coming of Wisdom with Time Upon a House Shaken by the Land Agitation Responsibilities — 1914 September 1913 To a Shade Friends The Cold Heaven The Magi A Coat The Wild Swans at Coole — 1919 To a Young Beauty The Hawk The Phases of the Moon The Cat and the Moon Michael Robertes and the Dancer — 1921 Easter, 1916 The Second Coming A Prayer for my Daughter The Tower — 1928 Sailing to Byzantium The Tower Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen A Prayer for my Son Leda and the Swan Among School Children All Souls' Night The Winding Stair and Other Poems — 1933 A Dialogue of Self and Soul Byzantium Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop Last Poems — 1939 The Circus Animals' Desertion Politics A GENERAL EVALUATION OF YEATS'S POETRY YEATS AS A DRAMATIST [The Plays] The Countess Cathleen The Shadowy Waters Deirdre At the Hawk's Well The Words Upon the Window-Pane A Full Moon in March The Herne's Egg Purgatory Select Bibliograph Index