“The Lake Isle of Innisfree” is perhaps W.B. Yeats’s most famous and beloved poem. Yet Yeats had a complicated relationship to the poem. In an interview later in life, he recognized that it was his first truly original poem: “[It was] my first lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music.” Yet he also recognized that it was quite old-fashioned: “A couple of years later I could not have written that first line with its conventional archaism—‘Arise and go’—nor the inversion of the last stanza." Yeats’s mentee, the modernist poet Ezra Pound, even wrote a poem satirizing Yeats: “The Lake Isle.” Although Yeats felt the poem was of an era now past, wherever he went to speak, he was asked to read the poem. It began to be recited by Boy Scouts in Ireland and the first two lines were even eventually printed on the Irish passport.
Today, the poem continues to be well-known, particularly because of musical adaptations and allusions. The poem was set to music as early as 1928 by Muriel Herbert. It was also set to music by Judy Collins and the Dream Brothers. More recently, it was alluded to in the song “Yeat’s [sic] Grave” by the band The Cranberries, who sing the lyric: “And you sit here with me, in the Isle Innisfree.” The American indie rock band Fleet Foxes mentions Yeats’s poem in many of their songs: "The Shrine/An Argument", "Isles" and "Bedouin Dress."
The poem has been referred to in TV and film, as well. In the show Fringe, Dr. William Bell (Leonard Nimoy) describes the first stanza of the poem. In the film Million Dollar Baby, Clint Eastwood’s character reads the beginning of the poem to Hilary Swank’s character.
There is even a South Korean makeup brand called Innisfree. It was named after Yeats’s poem.
