Michael Robartes and the Dancer has long been regarded as an odd combination of ballad-history and self-revelation.

This edition presents all the extant manuscripts for the poems which Yeats wrote between 1914 and 1919, a critical period that included his marriage.

Published during the blossoming of Yeats's maturity, (between The Wild Swans at Coole and The Tower), the collection displays poems that confronted political, personal, and philosophical issues that were of great interest to the author.

Literary critic Harold Bloom of Yale found a single unifying theme in Michael Robartes and the Dancer: "hatred, both sexual and political".

It includes the poems:

    Michael Robartes and the Dancer

    Solomon And The Witch

    An Image From A Past Life

    Under Saturn

    Easter, 1916

    Sixteen Dead Men

    The Rose-Tree

    On A Political Prisoner

    The Leaders Of The Crowd

    Towards Break Of Day

    Demon And Beast

    The Second Coming

    A Prayer For My Daughter

    A Meditation In Time Of War

    To Be Carved On A Stone At Thoor Ballylee

These poems of intricate beauty reveal the themes that were to occupy Yeats’s poetic genius for the remainder of his life.

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS (1865-1939) was an Irish poet, dramatist, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. He studied poetry in his youth, and from an early age was fascinated by both Irish legends and the occult. In 1923, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for what the Nobel Committee described as "inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation."