As a young man, William Butler Yeats was deeply affected by the idea of romantic love, or, as he called it, "the old high way of love." Characteristically, much of his early poetry that which was written prior to 1910, is poetry that belongs to courtship.

When Yeats was twenty-three years old, he met and fell in love with the beautiful Irish nationalist, Maud Gonne. Although she repeatedly refused to marry Yeats, Maud would become the object of his passion and his poetry. The emotional power in many of Yeats' early poems is shaped by the one-sidedness of his affair with Maud, but the poems themselves remain hopeful and bitter-sweet, pure in their language and attitudes about love.

The forty-one poems collected in A Poet to his Beloved represent some of Yeats's most evocative and passionate early love poems. These versed are simple, lyrical, and often dreamy, and they speak knowingly of innocence and beauty, passion and desire, devotion and the fear of rejection.

This book is aimed at children in secondary school.

There are 80 pages in this book. This book was published 1998 by St Martin's Press .

W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) was born in Dublin and was educated in Ireland and England. An Irish poet, and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature, he was instrumental in the development of a national Irish theatre - and in particular the founding of the Abbey Theatre. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.