Whether autobiographical, topical, or specifically literary, these writings circle the central preoccupying questions of Seamus Heaney's career: "How should a poet properly live and write? What is his relationship to be to his own voice, his own place, his literary heritage and the contemporary world?" Along with a selection from the poet's three previous collections of prose (Preoccupations, The Government of the Tongue, and The Redress of Poetry), the present volume includes Heaney's finest lectures and a rich variety of pieces not previously collected in volume form, ranging from short newspaper articles to radio commentaries. In its soundings of a wide range of poets -- Irish and British, American and Eastern European, predecessors and contemporaries -- Finders Keepers is, as its title indicates, "an announcement of both excitement and possession."

Table of contents

An up-to-date overview of Heaney's career thus far, with detailed readings of all his major publications.

The idea of place runs like a river through the life and works of the poet and playwright W.B. Yeats. This book focuses on his time in Dublin, London, Sligo and elsewhere in the west of Ireland, embracing the homes, landscapes and people that impacted his life and stimulated his vast body of work. Meet the poet's father, the struggling artist John Butler Yeats; his mother Susan, the well-to-do Sligo girl who had no choice but to follow her husband's path; his five siblings: Lily and Lolly, guiding lights in the Irish Arts and Crafts movement; Jack, the renowned painter; and Bobbie and Jane Grace, who died in infancy. Meet William Morris, John O'Leary, Katharine Tynan, George Moore, Oscar Wilde, Lady Gregory, Douglas Hyde, George Hyde-Lees, and, of course, Maud Gonne, as well as countless others who helped weave the cloth of Yeats's poetic gift.

Beautiful early writings by one of the 20th century’s greatest poets on the 150th anniversary of his birth A Penguin Classic The poems, prose, and drama gathered in When You Are Old present a fresh portrait of the Nobel Prize–winning writer as a younger man: the 1890s aesthete who dressed as a dandy, collected Irish folklore, dabbled in magic, and wrote heartrending poems for his beloved, the beautiful, elusive Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne. Included here are such celebrated, lyrical poems as “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” and “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven,” as well as Yeats’s imaginative retellings of Irish fairytales—including his first major poem, “The Wanderings of Oisin,” based on a Celtic fable—and his critical writings, which offer a fascinating window onto his artistic theories. Through these enchanting works, readers will encounter Yeats as the mystical, lovelorn bard and Irish nationalist popular during his own lifetime. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

As both a late Romantic and a modern, W.B. Yeats has proved to be perhaps the most influential poet of the early twentieth-century. In this original study Steven Matthews traces, through close readings of significant poems, the flow of Yeatsian influence across time and cultural space. By engaging with the formalist criticism of Harold Bloom and Paul de Man in their dialogues with Jacques Derrida, he also considers Yeats's significance as the founding presence within the major poetry criticism of the century.

Rich selection of 134 poems published between 1889 and 1914: "Lake Isle of Innisfree," "When You Are Old," "Down by the Salley Gardens," many more. Note. Alphabetical lists of titles and first lines.

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.