William Butler Yeats , who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923, is widely regarded as the best poet to write in English during the twentieth century. Yet from 1887 to 1905, the first third of his long career, he published twenty-three short stories and one short novel, and he left a second novel unfinished. Yeats always regarded himself primarily as a poet, however, and during the eighteen years he wrote fiction he also published a book of poems every three or four years. A few of Yeats 's stories deserve attention on their own merits, but even his less accomplished stories remain interesting because they reflect his growing fascination with Irish folklore and with the occult during the 1890s. Yeats 's work as a prose fiction writer also testifies to the vogue that short stories enjoyed during that decade.

Yeats was born in Dublin on 13 June 1865, but his family moved...