The Celtic Twilight

The Celtic Twilight – Faerie and Folklore ventures into the eerie and puckish world of fairies, ghosts, and spirits. 


"This handful of dreams," as the author referred to it, first appeared in 1893, and its title refers to the pre-dawn hours, when the Druids performed their rituals. It consists of stories recounted to the poet by his friends, neighbors, and acquaintances. 


Yeats walks a fine line between having us believe in the faeries that so many of the people he talks to say they have seen and heard, and regarding them simply as "dramatizations of our moods," an example of the “taste for unapproachable beauty” he sought forever to capture in his poems. 



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."