Sold as a pair, because everyone should have a pocket pair of Pans.

Few poets have shaped the English language as profoundly as W. B. Yeats. Moving from Celtic twilight and folklore into the fractured politics and private reckonings of the twentieth century, his work charts one of literature's great artistic evolutions. This selection, edited by the distinguished Yeats scholar A. Norman Jeffares, follows that arc across the poems that made him indispensable: lyric, mystical, political and devastatingly personal.

Loosely inspired by the life of Paul Gauguin, The Moon and Sixpence remains one of the sharpest novels ever written about artistic obsession. Charles Strickland abandons his comfortable middle-class life without explanation, leaving behind family, respectability and every accepted social obligation in pursuit of painting. The novel refuses to sentimentalise either the artist or the cost of creation, instead asking whether great art justifies extraordinary selfishness.

Pan Books paperback. Fourth printing of the Pan edition, published 1976, following the Macmillan selection first issued in 1962.

Pan Books paperback edition, published 1974. Good vintage condition with rubbing and edge wear to the covers, age toning to the pages and a solid, well-bound text block.