When you are old and grey and full of sleep, And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep; How many loved ...

November 2020 marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of one of the most famous and influential poems of the 20th century. It is titled “The Second Coming.” It was written in 1919 by the Irish ...

A young girl in the indolence of her youth, Or an old man upon a winter’s night.

RECENT celebrations of the great Irish poet W B Yeats (1865-1939) have included a fascinating appreciation of his life and work by Bob Geldof on BBC4. Here are two of Yeats’s short but best known ...

WILLIAM Butler Yeats, at the age of seventy-three, stands well within the company of the great poets. He is still writing, and the poems which now appear, usually embedded in short plays or set into ...

Mistakes are instructive. In particular, they can become a form of analysis, as, for example, in sports or music, when getting something a little bit wrong leads to improvement in technique or ...

The publication of “The Poems of Seamus Heaney” is an occasion to celebrate the Nobel Prize winning poet whose work extends Ireland’s extraordinary literary lineage. Heaney takes his place alongside ...

William Butler Yeats, one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, was born in Ireland 150 years ago this week, and across the country, the Irish are celebrating with public readings and festivals.

William Butler Yeats, at the age of seventy-three, stands well within the company of the great poets. He is still writing, and the poems which now appear, usually embedded in short plays or set into ...