What is William Butler Yeats’s most famous poem?

William Butler Yeats’s most famous poem is considered by some to be “The Second Coming” (1920), a two-stanza piece in blank verse that features imagery of swirling chaos and terror and prophesies the cataclysmic end of an era. It contains the famous line “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” and the ending “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

Another of his famous poems is “Easter, 1916,” which was written in that year to commemorate the martyrs of the Easter Rising, an insurrection against the British government in Ireland that resulted in the execution of several Irish nationalists whom Yeats knew personally. Its famous line is “A terrible beauty is born,” which appears in the poem three times.

His “Sailing to Byzantium” (1927), which features the line “That is no country for old men,” is also well known.