William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) composed poetry about history and Ireland and the occult, about swans and gyres and ancient Byzantium, but fundamentally he almost always wrote about love.

Acclaimed Irish poet William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) wrote this exquisite poem for fiery Irish revolutionary and actress ...

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and ...

I met my future husband at 19, and I wrote this poem in a notebook for him. By then it had already been echoing around inside me for years, telling me the truth about love. (Love is monomaniacal ...

In another of my favorite love poems, William Butler Yeats uses the word “game,” but in order to reach beyond it: To receive Sidney’s poem as a love-gift would be overwhelmingly sweet ...

Two principal sources genuinely inspired the poems of Yeats - love for his motherland and intense attraction for women, particularly for beautiful ones. Women were like Muses to him. His ...

back to the poems themselves, with a sense that Yeats was, as Auden put it, “silly like us”, but a supreme love poet for all that.

with a passion for Irish nationalism and a love for romantic poetry, “a fin de siècle beauty in Valkyrie mode”, wrote Yeats’s biographer, Roy Foster, “and both her appearance and ...

Readers who know about Yeats’ unrequited love for a young Dublin actress find in the poem a wistful sadness for a love that didn’t work out. Remember, he says to her, when you are old and gray ...