Gathered by the renowned Irish poet, playwright, and essayist William Butler Yeats, the sixty-five tales and poems in this delightful collection uniquely capture the rich heritage of the Celtic imagination. Filled with legends of village ghosts, fairies, demons, witches, priests, and saints, these stories evoke both tender pathos and lighthearted mirth and embody what Yeats describes as “the very voice of the people, the very pulse of life.”
“The impact of these tales doesn’t stop with Yeats, or Joyce, or Oscar Wilde,” writes Paul Muldoon in his Foreword, “for generations of readers in Ireland and throughout the world have found them flourishing like those persistent fairy thorns.”
William Butler Yeats
About William Butler Yeats
Keith Alldritt, professor of English at the University of British Columbia, is the author of The Making of George Orwell, The Visual Imagination, D. H. Lawrence, Modernism in the Second World War, Churchill the Writer: His Life as a Man of Letters, The Greatest of Friends: Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, and three novels. Professor Alldritt is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in Vancouver.
Praise
Praise
“These folk-tales are full of simplicity and musical occurrences, for they are the literature of a class...who have steeped everything in the heart: to whom everything is a symbol.”—William Butler Yeats
Irish Fairy and Folk Tales by Edited and with an Introduction by William Butler Yeats