From the publication of his first poems at the age of twenty to his Nobel Prize in 1923, W. B. Yeats transitioned from an aspiring poet, enchanted by the mystical life, to a charmer of the modern poem and complex symbolic language. When You are Old: Early Poems and Fairy Tales returns to the younger Yeats, exploring him through Irish mythology and beloved poems like “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” and “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” that made him popular during his lifetime. The poems, plays, and prose collected here present Yeats as the aesthete of the 1890s, who dressed as a dandy, collected Irish folklore, experimented with magic, and wrote beautiful poems for his beloved, filled with the late-Victorian aesthetics of the symbolists and decadence, as well as early modernism. Approaching his early poetry and stories with innocent innocence, as if reading Yeats for the first time, this volume offers rich images of western Ireland filled with fairies and other worlds, framed by a deep fascination for aestheticism and the Arts and Crafts Movement, expressing Yeats's early nationalist sympathies.