An original, yet lucid and accessible introduction to the often difficult poetry of W.B. Yeats. No poet in this century has shaped his work so directly out of reaction to the history of his times. Yeats’s antithetical vision, his fascination with conflict, energy, turbulence and the bodiliness of being, his sense of poetry as a dramatic process, indicate how closely bound up are the stylistic and the thematic dimensions of his art. As a poet of carnality as much as of politics, Yeats is unexcelled. The aim of this book is to show what an exciting writer he is, to reveal the relevance and contemporaneity of his work, even in its more esoteric aspects, and to make its study less intimidating than it can sometimes seem.