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
Advertisements