The Poetical Works Author:William Butler Yeats Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: APPENDIX I THE LEGENDARY AND MYTHOLOGICAL FOUNDATION OF THE PLAYS AND POEMS Almost every story I have used or person I have spoken of is in one or other of... more » Lady Gregory's " Gods and Fighting Men" and " Cuchulain of Muirthemne." If my present small Dublin audience for poetical drama grows and spreads beyond Dublin, I shall owe it to these two books, masterpieces of prose, which can but make the old stories as familiar to Irishmen everywhere as are the stories of Arthur and his knights to all readers of books. I cannot believe that it is from friendship that I weigh these books with Mallory and feel no discontent at the tally, or that it is the wish to make the circumstantial origin of my own art familiar, that would make me give them before all other books to Irish boys and girls. I wrote for the most part before they were written, but all or all but all is there, Oisin wandering, Cuchulain killing his son and fighting the sea, Maeve and her children, Baile and Aillin, Angus and his fellow-immortals, all literally translated, though with much condensation and selection, from the old writings. A few of my stories are not hers also. I took the story of "The Ballad of the Old Fox Hunter" from "Knocknagow," and the story of "The Ballad of Father Hart" from a Sligo county history; that of " The Ballad of Moll Magee " from a sermon preached in the chapel at Howth if I remember rightly, that of "The Countess Cathleen" from a story told as Irish by Leo Lespes in "Les Matinees de Timoth6 Trimm,"—there is a Donegal story resembling it in its principal incident in Larmonie's "West Irish Folk Tales," —and the story of the "King's Threshold" from a middle Irish account of the fantastic demands of the poet at the court of King Guaire; but I have revised the moral of this last story to let ...« less