The theatre of William Butler Years is one of the permanent legacies of English literature, and this edition marks the first time a selection of his plays has been made available in the United States. These eleven plays cover the whole brilliant spectrum of Yeats' dramatic genius - from the romantic dramas of his youth to his last play, The Death of Cuchulain, written shorty before his death at the age of seventy-three. Manager of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin for many years, Yeats devoted great energy and courage to the creation of an Irish theatre and a poetic drama. He discovered and aided the work of other Irish dramatists, Lady Gregoy and John Synge among them. In this own plays he sought to express romantic love, to give life to literary and philosphical ideas, and to restate the heroic ideal. His desire to believe, to create the great moments of tragedy, to convey something of his sardonic as well as his profoundly serious attitude to life resulted, as the plays in this volume so powerfully attest, in a body of dramatic work of unparalleled beauty and emotional intensity.
Author
William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and dramatist, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years Yeats served as an Irish Senator for two terms. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival, and along with Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn founded the Abbey Theatre, serving as its chief during its early years. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for what the Nobel Committee described as "inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation." He was the first Irishman so honored. Yeats is generally considered one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize; such works include The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1929). Yeats was born and educated in Dublin but spent his childhood in County Sligo. He studied poetry in his youth, and from an early age was fascinated by both Irish legends and the occult. Those topics feature in the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the century. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and those slow paced and lyrical poems display debts to Edmund Spenser and Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as to the Pre-Raphaelite poets. From 1900, Yeats' poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life. —from Wikipedia
