The Celtic Twilight

Sketches of the country people of Sligo and Galway and what they told Yeats about the other world: a man who lost his shadow, a woman taken by the fairies, a piper, a ghost at a crossroads. Yeats collected them in the 1890s while writing his early poems and set them down without explaining them away. It is the book in which Irish folklore stops being quaint and starts being evidence. Sixty plates by Walter Osborne and Ernest Waterlow record Irish town and country life from 1771 to 1918, the same world Yeats walked through while gathering these stories.