In the Seven Woods

This is the first book of Yeats's "middle period," in which he eschewed his previous Romantic ideals and preference for pre-Raphaelite imagery, in favor of a more spare style and an anti-romantic poetic stance similar to that of Walter Savage Landor.

I made some of these poems walking about among the Seven Woods, before the big wind of nineteen hundred and three blew down so many trees, & troubled the wild creatures, & changed the look of things; and I thought out there a good part of the play which follows.

I never re-wrote anything so many times; for at first I could not make these wills that stream into mere life poetical.

But now I hope to do easily much more of the kind, and that our new Irish players will find the buskin and the sock.

[2] Here ends In the Seven Woods, written by William Butler Yeats, printed, upon paper made in Ireland, and published by Elizabeth Corbet Yeats at the Dun Emer Press, in the house of Evelyn Gleeson at Dundrum in the county of Dublin, Ireland, finished the sixteenth day of July in the year of the big wind 1903.