W.B. Yeats and the Art of the Book

William Butler Yeats is a legendary Nobel Prize winning Irish poet and author of famous works including No Second Coming, Leda and the Swan and the Lake Isle of Inisfree. His collections of poetry include the Tower and the Winding Stair. He was a mover and innovator in the period of the Irish cultural revolution and did much to establish and develop the reputation of Irish literature and culture at the foundation of the Irish Free State.

Yeats trained as an artist in his youth and throughout his life was an impassioned observer of developments in both the visual arts and literature. His enthusiasm for the visual found expression in stage design at the Abbey Theatre and in the physical production of his books. W.B. Yeats and the Art of the Book provides a cameo of insight into the poet’s engagement with book design on just one of his many collections of poetry: The Wind Among the Reeds. It provides information on collaboration between Yeats and book designers including the Irish designer and artist, Althea Gyles. Background and information is provided on Ireland and on Irish fairy referred to Yeats’s poetry. And finally, we examine the importance of the relation, for Yeats, between the physical book and the poetry it contains.