Critics often divide the work of W. B. Yeats into three periods. His return to Ireland in 1896 marked a major transition to his second period, characterized by a strong interest in Irish legends and myths. The Wind Among the Reeds (1899) was written at the peak of this period and is considered a watershed. Richard Ellman wrote that Yeats “set the tone for the modern movement” with this volume of 37 poems that Yeats described as “a book of short lyrics and personal”.  Taken together the poems tell a tale of quest and loss, and feature a variety of personae: Aedh, a figure derived from from Aodh, a Celtic god of death; Michael Robartes; Red  Hanrahan; and Mongan, a figure from Celtic literature. Scholar Virginia Hyde writes that the poems “sound keynotes of painful desire, world-weariness, and apocalyptic fantasy... In Yeats's iconography, the reeds represent all perishable mortal things while the wind signifies the uncanny immortal powers buffeting them and interacting with them; wind also suggests to Yeats the "vague desires" of humans who are forever unsatisfied by the transient and palpable. ”  Many are intense love poems, and can be seen as a quasi-biographical story of Yeats' unrequited passion for revolutionary Maud Gonne. Stylistically the poems are, in Yeats' words, “curiously elaborate”, and range from simple ballads to stately verse, lush in diction, with echoes of Spenser, Blake and Shelley.  The volume closes with notes on the characters and subjects.

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