Start with Responsibilities, the 1914 volume. The obvious alternative is to buy the Collected Poems and begin at page one, and that is the commonest reason readers stall before reaching the Yeats who matters — page one drops you into the 1890s dream-work, in a style he later dismantled on purpose.
Responsibilities is the hinge. The ornament is stripped out, the syntax becomes speech, and the tone turns hard and public; the short poem A Coat is his own account of the change, where he says outright that he walks naked now. September 1913 carries the volume's politics, a furious lament that the Ireland he had imagined has been replaced by a commercial middle class.
Read poetry slowly or it does not register. Four or five poems a sitting, three or four sittings a week, and each poem three times: once silently for sense, once aloud immediately, once aloud again a day later. The third reading is where most of the value is and it is the one people skip.
The turn toward the modern
After Responsibilities, The wild swans at Coole from 1917 — the book of loss, its title poem counting the swans and counting the years, much of the rest elegy for Robert Gregory. An Irish Airman Foresees His Death compresses the whole volume into sixteen lines and is the poem to memorise if you memorise one.
Yeats arranged his books as sequences, so reading a volume front to back gives you an order he intended, which a selected-poems anthology does not. Listen for how often a line breaks against the sentence rather than with it; that tension is the sound of the new style.
The two great late volumes
The tower, from 1928, is the volume critics mean when they call Yeats the major poet of the century. He is in his sixties, furious about ageing, and writing with more force than at thirty. Slow down for Sailing to Byzantium and Among School Children. Meditations in Time of Civil War and Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen were written from a house with soldiers at the door, and are where his public poetry stops being commentary and becomes eyewitness.
The Winding Stair And Other Poems, from 1933, answers rather than repeats it: A Dialogue of Self and Soul chooses life over transcendence, and the Crazy Jane poems put the argument in the mouth of an old woman speaking bluntly about the body. Byzantium is a deliberate revision of Sailing to Byzantium — read the pair in that order and the second becomes far less forbidding.
Last poems and two plays, published the year he died, is the smallest and strangest book. The Circus Animals' Desertion dismantles his own career image by image, and Under Ben Bulben is his self-written epitaph.
The politics belong in this stretch because they are contemporary with it. Yeats served as a senator of the Irish Free State and took the Nobel Prize in 1923; in the 1930s he associated with the Blueshirts, Eoin O'Duffy's quasi-fascist movement, and wrote marching songs for them which he later revised; he belonged to the Eugenics Society, and his late prose pamphlet On the Boiler argues for eugenic measures and against democratic government. Readers reach different conclusions about how far the late work is implicated. What is not in dispute is that the beliefs were real, late, and stated in his own prose.
The system behind the poems
The late poems assume a system stated nowhere in the verse. Per amica silentia lunae is the readable statement of the doctrine of the Mask — that a man becomes an artist by putting on the opposite of himself — and it contains the sentence that explains his whole method, about the quarrel with others making rhetoric and the quarrel with ourselves making poetry.
A vision is the full apparatus: the gyres, two interlocking cones of history, and the twenty-eight phases of the moon into which every personality is sorted. The material came through automatic writing produced by his wife George, and Yeats presents it as received rather than invented. Read it for the diagrams and the historical cones and stop; you need the vocabulary, not the whole book.
Autobiographies is the most enjoyable prose here — the Rhymers' Club, the Golden Dawn, the founding of the Abbey Theatre, Lady Gregory, and Maud Gonne. Read it as constructed rather than candid; composing a public self is itself an application of the Mask.
Going back for the early Yeats
Read Michael Robartes and the dancer first in this stage, out of apparent order, because it is not early at all — published in 1920, it holds Easter, 1916, The Second Coming and A Prayer for My Daughter. Then The wanderings of Oisin, the Celtic Twilight at full volume, and The Celtic twilight, the prose folklore collected in Sligo and Galway that is the raw material of the early poems. Finish with In the seven woods, where the turn begins; watch Adam's Curse, a conversation in plain speech about how much labour goes into sounding spontaneous.
Read backwards like this, the early style stops looking like a false start and starts looking like a coherent programme he abandoned on purpose. More poetry paths are on Discover.
Follow the full ordered path here: W.B. Yeats Reading Order: Where to Start.
