The Tower

W. B. Yeats

Jan 2024 · Open Road Media

About this ebook

The Irish Nobel Prize–winning poet meditates on life, age, and reality in this most-famous collection of his work.

Originally published in 1928, The Tower is W. B. Yeats’s first collection of poetry as a Nobel Laureate. It features some of his most famous work and cemented his reputation as one of the greatest literary minds of the twentieth century.

The poems cover themes of life and the physical world, reality and myth, and love. They include the titular “The Tower,” inspired by the fifteenth-century Norman tower-house Yeats purchased, restored, and inhabited in County Galway, Ireland. Also in the collection are “Among School Children,” “Leda and the Swan,” and “Sailing to Byzantium.”

“Mr. Yeats has never written more exactly and more passionately.” —Virginia Woolf

“Yeats has not brought his poetry down; he has raised man up.” —The New York Times

About the author

William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) was an Irish poet, playwright, and author who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923. Yeats published his first works in the mid-1880s while still a student; however, his most famous works, such as The Tower and Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems, were not published until after he received the Nobel. He teamed up with Lady Gregory to develop plays in Ireland and soon founded the Irish National Theatre Society. He has since inspired poets and playwrights around the world.