The Lake Isle of Innisfree What Do I Read Next?
by William Butler Yeats

• Yeats was a playwright as well as a poet. To sample some of Yeats’s plays, read The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W. B. Yeats (1966), edited by Russell K. Alspach.

• In Yeats at Work (1965), Bradford Curtis examines selected manuscripts of Yeats, showing the progression of various poems through numerous revisions.

• Mario D’Avanzo compares “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” with “The Song of Solomon” in his 1971 essay in The McNeese Review.

• Susan Johnston Graf’s 2000 study entitled W. B. Yeats: Twentieth-Century Magus examines Yeats’s membership in the Order of the Golden Dawn, an occultist group. Graf also documents Yeats’s magical practices and their relation to his work.

• To learn more about Innisfree itself, read Tadhg Kilgannon’s 1926 book, Sligo and Its Surroundings: A Descriptive and Pictorial Guide to the History, Scenery, Antiquities and Places of Interest in and around Sligo.

• Bernard G. Krimm’s W. B. Yeats and the Emergence of the Irish Free State, 1918–1939: Living in the Explosion (1981) examines Yeats’s writing and career in relation to Ireland’s drive to free itself of British control at the beginning of the twentieth century.

• Tom Mulvany’s essay entitled “The Genesis of a Lyric: Yeats’s ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’” explores how Yeats came to write the poem. It is part of the Winter 1965 volume of Texas Quarterly, pp. 160–64.

• Maire and Conor Cruise O’Brien’s Ireland: A Concise History (1972) presents a compact and unbiased history of Ireland, complete with informative photographs. Maire O’Brien is the daughter of Sean Mac Entee, veteran of the Rising of 1916 and former Irish politician.

• Many poets have parodied Yeats’s poem. One of the best-known parodies is Ezra Pound’s 1916 poem entitled “The Lake Isle.”

• A. G. Stock’s 1961 book from Cambridge...