About
An independent Irish site with one aim: to be the best place on the web to read W. B. Yeats.
Who we are
yeats.ie is an independent digital library. It is not connected with the Yeats Society Sligo, the National Library of Ireland, the Yeats estate or any university, and nothing here speaks for them. If you are looking for them, their own sites are the place to go.
The texts
Yeats died in January 1939, and in Ireland and the rest of the EU his work has been in the public domain since 2010. The poems published up to 1928 come from the Standard Ebooks edition, a carefully proofread text released under a CC0 dedication, which follows the collected editions Yeats revised between 1908 and 1928. A few poems it leaves out come from early printed editions, and the poems of the 1929 Winding Stair were transcribed from scans of the 1933 edition and checked line by line against a second copy. Each poem page names its source.
Yeats revised his poems all his life, so the text you know may differ a little from the one here. Where he rewrote a poem heavily, the page says so.
The later poems
The poems Yeats first published from 1932 onwards are public domain in Ireland but, under American law, still in copyright in the United States for a few more years. Because parts of this site are served from American servers, those poems have notes, summaries and context here for now, but not the full text. Each page says when its text will appear, and it will appear automatically on that date.
The notes and summaries
Every summary, line-by-line note and study guide is written in plain English to help you read the poem, never to replace it. Every quotation in the notes has been checked word for word against the poem, and facts about his life are drawn from a researched timeline. If you spot a mistake, please tell us.
Pictures and recordings
The watercolours were made for this site with an image generator and checked by hand; they are impressions, not records. Photographs and portraits are public domain or openly licensed, credited to their makers. The readings are volunteer recordings fromLibriVox, dedicated to the public domain.
Get in touch
Corrections, suggestions and typos are all welcome at .