The Tower

The Irish Nobel Prize–winning poet meditates on life, age, and reality in this most-famous collection of his work.

Originally published in 1928, The Tower is W. B. Yeats’s first collection of poetry as a Nobel Laureate. It features some of his most famous work and cemented his reputation as one of the greatest literary minds of the twentieth century.

The poems cover themes of life and the physical world, reality and myth, and love. They include the titular “The Tower,” inspired by the fifteenth-century Norman tower-house Yeats purchased, restored, and inhabited in County Galway, Ireland. Also in the collection are “Among School Children,” “Leda and the Swan,” and “Sailing to Byzantium.”

“Mr. Yeats has never written more exactly and more passionately.” —Virginia Woolf