Sailing to Byzantium
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90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books
‘Under bare Ben Bulben’s head
In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.
An ancestor was rector there
Long years ago, a church stands near,
By the road an ancient cross.
No marble, no conventional phrase;
On limestone quarried near the spot
By his command these words are cut:
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!’
W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) was one of the greatest and most innovative poets of the twentieth century, and a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival. Much of his most vigorous verse on love, sex, Irish and international politics, the complexities of the occult and the 'sedentary toil' of poetry was produced in the years between his fiftieth birthday in 1915 and his death in 1939. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923.