A Terrible Beauty Is Born

'But I, being poor, have only my dreams; / I have spread my dreams under your feet...' 
 
By turns joyful and despairing, some of the twentieth century's greatest verse on fleeting youth, fervent hopes and futile sacrifice.

W B Yeats (1865 - 1939) is one of the greatest and most innovative poets of the twentieth century. Much of his most vigorous verse on love, sex, Irish and international politics, the complexities of the occult and the 'sedentary toil' of poetry was produced in the years between his fiftieth birthday in 1915 and his death in 1939.

The Playboy of the Western World and Two Other Irish Plays

J.M. Synge was born in 1871. 1n 1895 he went to Paris and in the following year met W. B. Yeats and consequently joined the Irish League. He was first a literary adviser and then a director of the Abbey Theatre, and his own plays appeared in repertory. He died in 1909. 
 
Sean O'Casey was born in Dublin in 1880. In 1926 he moved to England. He discouraged any professional performances of his plays in Ireland after the Archbishop of Dublin refused to inaugurate the Dublin festival if his play The Drums of Father Ned (1958) was included. He died in 1964. 
 
W. B. Yeats, the irish dramatist, poet, autobiographer, critic and occult philosopher, was born in 1865. At the age of nineteen he attended an art school in Dublin, but already his central interest was in writing. Towards the end of his life he enjoyed many honours, including the Nobel Prize and membership of the Irish Senate. He died in France in 1939.

A murderer becomes the toast of the village as his charm negates his crime. A young countess saves her tenants from starvation, but only by selling her soul to the Devil. The sleepy parish of Nyadnanave sees a vision of a cockerel that dares the inhabitants to break the shackles of Church and State. All these plays were met with moral outrage and rioting in their native Ireland. 
 
Yeats's 'The Countess Cathleen' (1892), J. M. Synge's 'The Playboy of the Western World' (1907) and O'Casey's 'Cock-a-doodle Dandy' (1949) emerged from a period of traumatic change for Ireland. While the plays bear witness to the immmense social upheavals of the turn of the twentieth century, they also represent a new age of Irish drama that rose from the turmoil, and their lessons ring true to this day.

Sailing to Byzantium

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books 
 
‘Under bare Ben Bulben’s head 
In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid. 
An ancestor was rector there 
Long years ago, a church stands near, 
By the road an ancient cross. 
No marble, no conventional phrase; 
On limestone quarried near the spot 
By his command these words are cut: 
 
Cast a cold eye 
On life, on death. 
Horseman, pass by!’

W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) was one of the greatest and most innovative poets of the twentieth century, and a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival. Much of his most vigorous verse on love, sex, Irish and international politics, the complexities of the occult and the 'sedentary toil' of poetry was produced in the years between his fiftieth birthday in 1915 and his death in 1939. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923.

‘Under bare Ben Bulben’s head 
In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid. 
An ancestor was rector there 
Long years ago, a church stands near, 
By the road an ancient cross. 
No marble, no conventional phrase; 
On limestone quarried near the spot 
By his command these words are cut: 
 
Cast a cold eye 
On life, on death. 
Horseman, pass by!’

W B Yeats

The Tower was W. B. Yeats's first major collection of poetry as Nobel Laureate after the receiving the Nobel Prize in 1923. It is considered to be one of his most influential collections. The title refers to Thoor Ballylee Castle, a Norman tower that Yeats purchased in 1917 and later restored. The Tower includes some of his greatest and most innovative poems including 'Sailing to Byzantium', a lyrical meditation on man's disillusionment with the physical world; 'Leda and the Swan', a violent and graphic take on the Greek myth of Leda and Zeus and 'Among School Children', a poetic contemplation of life, love and the creative process.

W B Yeats

The Tower

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