All Souls' Night
by William Butler Yeats
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See Also
- William Butler Yeats (Critical Survey of Drama, Second Revised Edition)
- William Butler Yeats (Critical Survey of Poetry: British, Irish, & Commonwealth Poets)
- William Butler Yeats (Cyclopedia of World Authors, Fourth Revised Edition)
- William Butler Yeats (Critical Survey of Short Fiction, Second Revised Edition)
- William Butler Yeats (Dictionary of World Biography: The 20th Century)
At a glance:
- Author: William Butler Yeats
- First Published: 1921
- Type of Poem: Meditation
- Genres: Poetry, Meditation
- Subjects: Acting or actors, Magic or magicians, Ghosts or apparitions, Spiritual life or spirituality, Death or dying, Painting or painters, Hell, Afterlife, Life and death, Mortality, Heaven
The Poem
“All Souls’ Night” is the last poem in William Butler Yeats’s most important collection of poetry, The Tower (1928). Organized into ten stanzas of ten lines each, it is a meditation, during All Souls’ Night, on several friends who have died. A subtitle indicates that the poem is an epilogue to Yeats’s book A Vision (1925), which is the codification of his theories of magic and history that were given to him by “Unknown Instructors” in the form of automatic writing transcribed by his wife Georgia. As such, the poem is meant to comment on...
(The entire page is 1460 words.)
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