Now, clearly they are from the same family of fruit, but no one who has eaten a pear would be likely to confuse it with an apple. And to me it is like trying to tell someone who has only ever eaten apples the difference between apples and pears. There is a real sense that the non-human beings discussed are actually believed in, in much the way people today might believe in ghosts, and that changes the telling of the stories.īut really, to explain the difference between these fairy stories and your common or garden variety we really need a good metaphor. There is something much less comfortable about these – something much less supernatural about their fairies and even giants. The relationship between the natural and supernatural is more dreamlike in these stories than in what I am used to in fairy tales. These stories would possibly come closer to ghost stories in a way.

If you are after such then you’ll have to jump nearly to the very end of this collection. You know, lots of familiar fairy tales but told in a tippering way with a fetching Irish brogue. This surprised me – I was suspecting this to be very much like the Grimm or Calvino efforts. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life.

From 1900, Yeats' poetry grew more physical and realistic. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and those slow paced and lyrical poems display debts to Edmund Spenser and Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as to the Pre-Raphaelite poets. Those topics feature in the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the century. He studied poetry in his youth, and from an early age was fascinated by both Irish legends and the occult. Yeats was born and educated in Dublin but spent his childhood in County Sligo. Yeats is generally considered one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize such works include The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1929). 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.' He was the first Irishman so honored. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival, and along with Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn founded the Abbey Theatre, serving as its chief during its early years. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years Yeats served as an Irish Senator for two terms. William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and dramatist, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature.

Irish Fairy and Folk Tales by Various