All Souls’ Night (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: William Butler Yeats
- First Published: 1921
- Type of Work: 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 long]
