Four Years

Four Years by William Butler Yeats invites listeners into the young poet’s London apprenticeship, an intimate, lyrical account of 1887–1891 that blends memory, social observation, and quiet wit. Yeats sketches life in Bedford Park—red-brick houses, Pre-Raphaelite curiosities, and the hum of late‑Victorian culture—while charting the small domestic scenes and artistic irritations that shaped his sensibility. Part literary biography, part autobiographical sketch, the work captures themes of aesthetic formation, family, urban change, and the tensions between enthusiasm and criticism that marked the era’s artistic movements. Yeats’s voice is at once precise and evocative: he memorializes decorative details, neighborhood characters, and the awkward beginnings of a literary life without losing sight of historical context. Listeners will hear a portrait of an Irish poet finding his bearings amid London’s suburbs, the Pre‑Raphaelite legacy, and shifting tastes at the end of the nineteenth century. Ideal for fans of William Butler Yeats, readers of literary biography, and anyone fascinated by Victorian cultural history, this audiobook offers a compact, beautifully observed meditation on youth, art, and the making of a writer.