Mythologies

In this volume you get The Celtic Twilight (1893), 34 Irish stories about the supernatural, where little people, faeries, ghosts (some of them headless) abound; most of them have been collected from the people who remember this old lore, but a few of them, like A Voice, and The Old Town, are from Yeats' own experience.The second part is The Secret Rose (1897), 9 legends that are perhaps my favorite section of this book, with stories like The Wisdom of the King, of a lonely hero who as a baby was given a "grey as the mist" drop of hawk crone blood, and whose hair was mixed with feathers.Stories of Red Hanrahan (1897 and rewritten in 1907), is the life and death of a wandering poet, "the learned man and the great songmaker", which includes a number of poems.Rosa Alchemica, Tables of the Law, and The Adoration of the Magi (1897) are on esoteric mysticism; glimpses into heaven and hell.The final part is Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1917), essays on spiritualism, Christianity, poetry and its writers, and more.Written with much beauty by the man many consider to be Ireland's greatest poet (and Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923), this unique collection of tales will enchant anyone interested in Irish history and its legends; legends which will, like the little creatures, last "until God shall burn up the world with a kiss".

A new level of Yeats. First you read his poems, then you digest the many folk and fairy tales he helped edit, then you move on to this one. Yeats was a man of his time, so he explored several issues of the day and we can thank him for saving and exploring a definite part of Irish History.

A Irish Victorian Classic. Strange volume. A little whimsical. Not exactly what I expected. I anticipated more pre-Christian Irish mythology, but it really seems to be more Yeat's compilation of rustic fairy stories.

This book is wonderful for any serious student of Yeats. I could not have been happier with it, there are some hard to find stories included, I would say this is a must have.

Is it really possible to know an ethnic group without knowing their mythologies.I doubt. Yeats has introduced me to the Irish. Mary

Excellent book. Package arrived in great shape. Many thanks!

beautiful, haunting stories

W.B Yeats while known best for his poetry wrote Mythologies a wonderfully subtle and atmospheric collection ofshort stories set in Ireland featuring ghost, faeries, and the like. While not graphically horrific by modernstandards, Mythologies captures the soft unexplainable moments that hover over rational human existence...the door down the hall that closes itself, the stranger on the road that never existed, the premonition thatleads to surreal encounter, the power of love to transcend mortality. This is the stuff of Mythologies. Greatlittle book on ghosts and other things that go bump in the night.