Sailing to Byzantium

Ireland's greatest and most influential poet.

Yeats's early poems reveal his interest in myth and fairy tale, his hopeless passion for beautiful revolutionary Maud Gonne, and his concern with the violent, tragic politics of Ireland. Later he turned to a vision of perfect, idealized beauty and wrote with wit and lyricism of the tension between the ageing body and the force of the mind.

Yeats described himself as one of the last romantics. His poems are filled with exhilirating energy and teasing, wondrous images.