W.B. Yeats

Ireland's greatest poet, William Butler Yeats, was also perhaps the outstanding poet to have written in English since Wordsworth. Many of his early poems - wistful, mysterious and suffused with Pre-Raphaelite imagery - are of haunting beauty, but in the early 1900s Yeats turned his thoughts increasingly to reality.

Directing his energies to the twin causes of the Irish Literary renaissance and of Irish national independence, he evolved a new style - austere but capable of sustained magnificence. Alongside over 100 documentary illustrations, Micheal Mac Liammoir and Eavan Boland trace Yeats' long and eventful career, covering such episodes as his directorship of the Abbey Theatre and service in the Irish Senate, as well as his poetic activities.