IRISH FAIRY TALES

In this selection of Irish fairy and folk tales, W B Yeats allows us in to a world of stories, legends and magic that have been handed down through generations. In his introduction he shares his precious knowledge of this tradition and its significance in the history of a people. Full of simplicity and music, this is the literature of a class for whom everything has gathered meaning and symbol, and Yeats' anthology represents every kind of folk-faith. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

W B Yeats was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1865 and spent much of his childhood in County Sligo, a place he loved and often wrote about. Yeats is often said to be a man of contradictions: he was profoundly intelligent and yet committed to spiritualism and the supernatural; he was philosophical and yet emotionally bound to a woman who did not return his devotion; he was aristocratic and detached and yet motivated by and artistically concerned with the most elementary of human impulses. In 1922 he was elected a senator of the Irish Free Republic and the following year he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. W B Yeats is remembered as an important cultural leader and as one of the greatest poets of the century. He died in 1939.