In The Cutting of an Agate, William Butler Yeats gathers essays that probe Irish literature, drama, and the making of art in a country still struggling to define itself. Drawing on his experience with the Abbey Theatre, he likens artistic creation to the cutting of an agate: a small, exacting craft that can reveal durable truths about imagination, discipline, and life. Across these pages, Yeats celebrates Irish myth, especially the Cuchulain cycle, as a source of enchantment, heroic intensity, and national identity, while contrasting it with more realistic or political strains of writing. He defends aristocracy, country life, courtesy, and style as the foundations of lasting culture, arguing that great art arises from freedom, self-command, and the mingling of joy and sorrow. He also traces the rise and decline of Irish literary movements, the tensions between artistic standards and patriotic verse, and the growing isolation of writers as politics becomes more practical and less heroic. The book offers moving portraits of Lady Gregory, Synge, Spenser, and others, especially Synge, whose work and early death Yeats treats as a fierce, beautiful, and uncompromising gift to Ireland. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.