The Poetry of W.B. Yeats

A century and a half since his birth, the Irish poet W.B. Yeats is one of the best-loved in the English language, known for his lyric poems such as ‘The Lake Isle of Innishfree’ or for romantic poems like ‘He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven.’ Throughout his literary career, though, Yeats wrote in a range of styles and on diverse subjects. His poems reflect his Irish nationalism, reinvent traditional genres, draw inspiration from Irish myth and legend, and push into innovative symbolism. Stephen Regan and Michael O’Neill take us on a journey through the varied landscape of Yeats’s verse. [MP3 version]

The poems are ordered as follows. Stephen Regan is the first reader you’ll hear.

1. The Lake Isle of Innisfree
2. The Song of Wandering Angus
3. To a Child Dancing in the Wind
4. The Wild Swans at Coole
5. The Fisherman
6. When You Are Old
7. He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
8. Adam’s Curse
9. The Cold Heaven
10. Easter, 1916
11. On a Political Prisoner
12. Sailing to Byzantium
13. Coole Park, 1929
14. An Acre of Grass
15. Beautiful, Lofty Things
16. Among School Children
17. In Memory of Eva Gore Booth and Con Markievicz
18. Dialogue of Self and Soul
19. Byzantium
20. The Circus Animals’ Desertion