Michael Robartes and the Dancer is a book collection of 15 poems. The book and thus the poems were written between the years 1914 and 1919, before it was published in 1920. Later on, the book has been republished various times, including the latest version that was published by Classic Books in 2000.
William Butler Yeats won a Novel Prize for Literature in 1923 for all his inspiring works. He was an Irish poet, Senator and dramatist. While writing the work, Yeats was growing up, becoming a man in the “real world”. The book therefore has a lot of descriptions of his experiences as he understood how things worked, which was rather quite sorrowful from his point of view. He also got married during this time period.
The book itself is written quite similar to Yeats's earlier works, such as The Wild Swans at Coole, though it has been described as less romantic and more abstract. This is also reflected in the format of the poems, that stop holding a particular pattern at one point, instead seemingly flowing where Yeats feels like it is natural.
