From the publication of his first poems at the age of twenty to his Nobel Prize in 1923, W. B. Yeats evolved from an aspiring poet fascinated by the mystical life to an Irish senator who created modernist poetry around a complex system of symbolism. "When You Are Old: Early Poems and Fairy Tales" returns to the younger Yeats, encountering him through Irish mythology and beloved poems like "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" and "He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven," which made him popular during his lifetime. The poems, pieces, and prose collected here present Yeats as the aesthete of the 1890s, who dressed as a dandy, collected Irish folklore, engaged with magic, and wrote beautiful poems for his beloved, infused with the late Victorian aesthetics of the symbolist and decadent movements as well as early modernism. With innocent openness, this volume approaches his early verses and tales as if reading Yeats for the first time, offering lush imagery of Western Ireland, filled with fairies and supernatural beings, embedded in a deep fascination for aestheticism and the Arts and Crafts movement, all expressing Yeats' early nationalist sympathies.