In these pages, they will have the opportunity to see the early folklore, drama, and poetry from a fresh perspective that reveals a very different Yeats. Not the bitter elitist railing against the middle classes during the 1910s or the self-assured high modernist of his late phase, but the young aesthete who dressed as a dandy, founded literary societies in Dublin and London, collected Irish folklore, penned dramatic works about ancient Ireland and the fairies, dabbled in magic, and wrote beautiful poems for Maud Gonne—the Yeats that people first came to know, that some loved, and that nearly all admired.

ROB DOGGETT

NOTES

1. W. B. Yeats, The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats: Later Articles and Reviews, vol. 10, ed. Colton Johnson (New York: Scribner, 2000), p. 224.

2. Quoted in R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 362.

3. Yeats, The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats: Autobiographies, vol. 3, ed. William H. O’Donnell and Douglass N. Archibald (New York: Scribner, 1999), p. 279.

4. Yeats, The Letters, ed. Allan Wade (London: Hart Davis, 1954), p. 434.

5. Yeats, The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach (New York: Macmillan, 1957), p. 814.

6.