Selected Poems by W.B. Yeats My rating: 3 of 5 stars In the introduction to the collection, Timothy Webb writes that ' Yeats maintained that poetry should be a revelation of hidden life' (and not a criticism of life, as Matthew Arnold felt). There is certainly a lot of revelation. Yeats wipes the layers of dust off mythology and Irish history and opens a box hidden in plain sight. I started the collection after a journey from Dublin to Belfast, and slowly dipped into its pages over a couple of months. Some of the poems remain a mystery, with references to names and places familiar to the poet, but not to the reader, and others echo history that is painful to many after more than four centuries in Ireland. My absolute favourite is 'Stolen Child' , but the haunting verses were already imprinted on my memory. In 1998, at the university halls of residence (Derwent D Block), Rachel, Neil, James, Ray, and I would cook Sunday lunch in a Baby...