This first volume collects Yeats's poetry of the 1880s, from his ambitious and extensive juvenilia (including hitherto little-noticed dramatic poems) to his earliest published pieces, leading to his first substantial book of verse. The pastoral romance of classically-inflected early work like 'The Island of Statues' is succeeded in these years by the Irish mythic material that finds its largest canvas in the mini-epic 'The Wanderings of Oisin'. In Yeats's work through the 1880s, an adolescent poet's youthful absorption in Romantic poetry is replaced by a commitment to esoteric religious speculation and Irish political nationalism. This edition allows readers to see Yeats's emergence as a poet step by step in compelling detail in relation to his literary influences - including, significantly, the Anglo-Irish poetry of the nineteenth century. The commentary provides an extensive view of Yeats's developing personal, cultural, and historical worlds as the poems gain in maturity and depth. From the first attempts at verse of a teenage boy to the fully accomplished writings of an original poet standing on the verge of popular success with poems such as 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree', Yeats's poetry is displayed here in unprecedented fullness and detail.