685 The Poetry of W. B. Yeats
Class | Registration opens 2/9/2026 11:00 AM
Irish writer William Butler Yeats was one of the major poetic voices of the modern era. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923, Yeats was famed for poetic meditations on Irish themes and love and aging as well as political violence. This BILL course will examine Yeats in context by studying selected poems, with particular attention to the political and cultural circumstances of his time and to the evolving poetic techniques he brought to his work throughout his life. Previous experience with poetry analysis is not required.
Required text:
The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, edited by Richard J. Finneran, with an introduction by Colm Tóibín. Second Revised Edition (1996). ISBN: 978-0684807317
Students need to have the primary textbook prior to the first class.
John Rickard
JOHN is professor emeritus of English at Bucknell, where he offered classes on the humanities and modern British and Irish literature. He has published essays on Yeats and other Irish writers and has taught and lectured by invitation at the W. B. Yeats Summer School in Sligo, Ireland.