LONDON — Amid fears that culturally significant items that belonged to the Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet W.B. Yeats would be sold to foreign buyers, the Irish government today announced it had secured the purchase of a portion of the collection ahead of an auction in London.

Over 200 lots of paintings, sketches and personal effects from the poet and his family members were sold in an auction at Sotheby’s here, fetching approximately 2 million pounds, or about $2.7 million.

Yeats’s writing bureau sold to a private bidder for £150,000, five times the estimated auction price. But the most valuable lot in the sale, a cache of love letters between Yeats and the author Olivia Shakespear worth an estimated £250,000 to £350,000, failed to sell.

The Irish arts minister, Heather Humphreys, announced today that her department had provided 650,000 euros, around $763,000, in funding to the National Museum of Ireland and the National Library of Ireland in July to buy “significant elements of the collection” on behalf of the state, according to a statement.