The Wild Swans at Coole
Yeats wrote these poems during the First World War, and the collection contains some of his best-known work: The Wild Swans at Coole, An Irish Airman Foresees His Death, and the beginning of the change in his style toward a harder, more spoken verse.
The poems are concerned with ageing, with the persistence of beauty, and with a country that is changing around him. Yeats's mythology is present but less dominant than in his earlier work. Read the title poem first, then the airman's poem, and notice how much is said in very few lines.
Public-domain status
First published in 1917. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; W. B. Yeats died in 1939, so this work has been free to republish there since 2010.
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- Project Gutenberg, ebook no. 32491 — plain text, EPUB and Kindle, checked by us
- Internet Archive — scanned editions and free audiobooks
- Open Library — edition history and borrowable copies
Keep reading
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- The Canterbury Tales — Geoffrey Chaucer, 1400
- Troilus and Criseyde — Geoffrey Chaucer, 1385
- Childe Harold's Pilgrimage — Lord Byron, 1812
- Reading lists — 19 ways through the collection
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