Collected Poems
Yeats is the indispensable bridge between Romanticism and Modernism, his early Celtic twilight giving way to the hard, bitter, visionary poetry of The Tower and The Winding Stair. "The Second Coming," "Leda and the Swan," "Sailing to Byzantium," "Among School Children": they sound unlike each other and unlike anything else. His "gyre" cosmology (elaborated in A Vision) is mystical nonsense that generated magnificent poetry. Nobel Prize 1923.
Skip lightly through the early Celtic Twilight, which is wallpaper mist, and brace for the system: gyres, phases of the moon, spirit instructors dictating cosmology to his wife. Late Yeats also wrote marching songs for Ireland's Blueshirts and turned eugenicist in On the Boiler. The great poems survive all this; the collected volume makes you wade through what they survived.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
