W. B. Yeats

The Cornell Yeats edition of the poetry collection, Responsibilities, features the only surviving example of Ezra Pound and the author collaboratively revising a poem by Yeats. Working on a set of page proofs of "The Two Kings"—one of the poems in the volume—while they shared Stone Cottage in Sussex during the winter of 1913–1914, Pound wrote proposed revisions and Yeats then reacted to them, accepting some, changing some, and rejecting some. This process of collaborative revision is a precursor of Pound's more extensive marking, nearly a decade later, of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Responsibilities is also of particular interest for its inclusion of a group of poems written about the highly public controversy over the attempts to build a Dublin Modern Art Gallery. Yeats wrote a long, detailed note in 1914 to explain the political background of the poems in this volume. The drafts of the note's sometimes caustic phrasing have survived and are included here.

Words upon the Window Pane, first staged in 1930, is W. B. Yeats's most powerful and brilliant dramatic exploration of the occult, in which he had a lifelong interest, and an affirmation of Anglo-Irish Protestant cultural ascendancy. Written at Lady Gregory's Coole Park estate, it features a séance in which Jonathan Swift's voice is projected through a medium. Like Yeats, Swift was both politician and poet, and taking Swift as his subject allowed Yeats to cloak a political message under personal character. Quite probably based on an obscure one-act play called Swift and Stella by Charles Edward Lawrence, Lady Gregory's editor, the play is centered on a romantic triangle involving Jonathan Swift and two women, Vanessa and Stella. Yeats's use of a séance as a frame permits him to compare the present with the past by putting twentieth-century Dubliners side by side with Swift's contemporaries. This volume of the Cornell Yeats contains transcriptions and photographic reproductions of the drafts of Words upon the Window Pane, with variant readings from proofs, typescripts, and notebook entries, as well as other materials pertaining to its writing, publication, and performance.

The Land of Heart's Desire, staged at the Avenue Theatre in London in 1894, marks W. B. Yeats's first use of Irish folklore in a play produced in the commercial theater, with important consequences for his career as a dramatist. This book includes transcriptions and photographs of the surviving holograph manuscripts of the play, reproductions of Yeats's own notes and revisions, and other materials related to stage productions and the resulting changes he made to the text. After Maud Gonne refused his offer of marriage in the summer of 1893, Yeats coped with his disappointment by burying himself in work. He composed a number of poems based on Irish folklore that would not see publication until 1899 and took steps to shape a literary renaissance in Ireland. In many of the pieces he wrote at this time, he developed the idea, sustained and refined throughout his life, that folklore was the foundation of a living mythology.

In 1895 the thirty-year-old W. B. Yeats, already established as one of Ireland's leading poets and folklorists, published this outstanding collection of Irish verse as part of his campaign to establish a tradition of Irish poetry fit for the dawn of a new age in Ireland's history. This Routledge Classics edition, complete with a specially commissioned introduction by acclaimed writer and critic John Banville, is essential reading for all who appreciate good literature.

In 1895 the thirty-year-old W. B. Yeats, already established as one of Ireland's leading poets and folklorists, published this outstanding collection of Irish verse as part of his campaign to establish a tradition of Irish poetry fit for the dawn of a new age in Ireland's history. This Routledge Classics edition, complete with a specially commissioned introduction by acclaimed writer and critic John Banville, is essential reading for all who appreciate good literature.

From reviews of The Cornell Yeats series:"For students of Yeats the whole series is bound to become an essential reference source and a stimulus to important critical re-readings of Yeats's major works. In a wider context, the series will also provide an extraordinary and perhaps unique insight into the creative process of a great artists."—Irish Literary Supplement"I consider the Cornell Yeats one of the most important scholarly projects of our time."—A. Walton Litz, Princeton University, coeditor of The Collected Poems of William Carols Williams and Personae: The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound"The most ambitious of the many important projects in current studies of Yeats and perhaps of modern poetry generally.... The list of both general and series editors, as well as prospective preparers of individual volumes, reads like a Who's Who of Yeats textual studies in North America. Further, the project carries the blessing of Yeats's heirs and bespeaks an ongoing commitment from a major university press.... The series will inevitably engender critical studies based on a more solid footing than those of any other modern poet.... Its volumes will be consulted long after gyres of currently fashionable theory have run on."—Yeats Annual (1983)This volume presents the surviving manuscripts, typescripts, and early printed texts for all of the poems W. B. Yeats included at one time or another in two remarkably significant and protean collections: In the Seven Woods, first published in 1903, and The Green Helmet and Other Poems, first published in 1910. It also documents the extant early record for seven poems Yeats wrote between 1899 and 1914 but either never published or never attached to one of his plays or collections of poems. During this crucial period in his career, Yeats transformed himself from a talented late-Victorian aesthete to a major modernist poet. The photographs and transcriptions provided here reveal much about how this remarkable change occurred. They are accompanied by ample supporting materials, including a descriptive bibliography of the manuscripts and an extensive critical introduction.

Originally published in 1892, The Countess Cathleen aroused fierce controversy when it was first performed in 1899. The play was frequently revived and almost as often revised, becoming at various points in Yeats's career a decisive indicator of his relations with his literary and theatrical public, of his changing conception of dramatic form, and of the status of his pursuit of Maud Gonne, for whom the play was written. This volume in the Cornell Yeats reproduces the complete set of extant manuscripts preceding the play's first publication and reassembles the extensive manuscript, proof, and authorial copy to present a crucial body of evidence of Yeats's work and thought in drama and theater over the course of three decades. The Cornell Yeats edition gives literatim transcriptions and photographic reproductions of all the holographic materials pertaining to the writing, revising, and rewriting of The Countess Cathleen from 1889 to 1934. It includes all textual variants from other sources such as typescript, corrected proofs, and prompt copies.

Autobiographies consists of six autobiographical works that William Butler Yeats published together in the mid-1930s to form a single, extraordinary memoir of the first fifty-eight years of his life, from his earliest memories of childhood to winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. This volume provides a vivid series of personal accounts of a wide range of figures, and it describes Yeats's work as poet and playwright, as a founder of Dublin's famed Abbey Theatre, his involvement with Irish nationalism, and his fascination with occultism and visions. This book is most compelling as Yeats's own account of the growth of his poetic imagination. Yeats thought that a poet leads a life of allegory, and that his works are comments upon it. Autobiographies enacts his ruling belief in the connections and coherence between the life that he led and the works that he wrote. It is a vision of personal history as art, and so it is the one truly essential companion to his poems and plays. Edited by William H. O'Donnell and Douglas N. Archibald, this volume is available for the first time with invaluable explanatory notes and includes previously unpublished passages from candidly explicit first drafts.

Banshees and faeries, demons and curses, village ghosts and mystic poets

THE CLASSIC ONE-VOLUME INTRODUCTION TO IRELAND'S RICH FOLKLORE: WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS'S MAGICAL SELECTION OF TRADITIONAL IRISH FAIRY AND FOLK TALES"Fairy and Folk Tales of Ireland" combines two books of Irish folklore collected and edited by William Butler Yeats -- "Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, " first published in 1888, and "Irish Fairy Tales, " published in 1892. In this delightful gathering of legend and song, the familiar characters of Irish myth come to life: the mercurial trooping fairies, as ready to make mischief as to do good; the solitary and industrious Lepracaun and his dissipated cousin, the Cluricaun; the fearsome Pooka, who lives among ruins and has "grown monstrous with much solitude"; and the Banshee, whose eerie wailing warns of death. More than an ambitious and successful effort to preserve the rich heritage of his native land, this volume confirms Yeats's conviction that imagination is the source of both life and art. As Benedict Kiely observes in his foreword, Yeats was seeking "not for the meaning of any mystery but for what he had already determined to find...a world of the imagination...a world that fed on dreaming and not on the painted toy of grey truth."

Based on a folktale called "The Priest's Soul," which Yeats first encountered in 1888, The Hour-Glass was written as both a play in prose and a drama in verse over the course of more than thirty years. This volume brings together all extant manuscripts of The Hour-Glass, from a handwritten three-page fragment of the 1902 prose version to Yeats's typescripts of the 1922 verse rendition.

The letters in this volume, the majority never before published, vividly document a tunultuous period in Yeats's life. They chart his transformation from a late Romantic, `Celtic' poet into a powerful and astringent modernist, the foundation of the Abbey Theatre and development of his own palywriting career, the emotional devastation of his beloved Maud Gonne's marriage to a man he despised, the encouragement of promising young writers including Joyce and Synge, and the impact of his first exposure to the United States. Letter by letter we see how private concerns and public controversies forced him to redefine his views on artistic freedom and responsibility, and to reshape his style. Rich and readable notes provide a narrative of these years, explaining allusions, and setting the correspondence in its cultural and political contexts as well as relating it to Yeats's canon as a whole. This book will be indispenable to anyone interested in the development of modern poetry, drama, and cultural history.

From reviews of The Cornell Yeats series: "For students of Yeats the whole series is bound to become an essential reference source and a stimulus to important critical re-readings of Yeats's major works. In a wider context, the series will also provide an extraordinary and perhaps unique insight into the creative process of a great artists."—Irish Literary Supplement "I consider the Cornell Yeats one of the most important scholarly projects of our time."—A. Walton Litz, Princeton University, coeditor of The Collected Poems of William Carols Williams and Personae: The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound "The most ambitious of the many important projects in current studies of Yeats and perhaps of modern poetry generally.... The list of both general and series editors, as well as prospective preparers of individual volumes, reads like a Who's Who of Yeats textual studies in North America. Further, the project carries the blessing of Yeats's heirs and bespeaks an ongoing commitment from a major university press.... The series will inevitably engender critical studies based on a more solid footing than those of any other modern poet.... Its volumes will be consulted long after gyres of currently fashionable theory have run on."—Yeats Annual (1983) Written during a period of illness in 1935–1936, Yeats's play combines frank sexual content with bizarre imagery from the Indian and tribal Irish traditions. This edition provides a full transcription of the only extant manuscript version of the play.

A leader of the twentieth-century Irish nationalist movement, who eventually became one of the Free States's senators, William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) is also the greatest poet that nation has yet produced. The present selection includes poetry from every period in life, dealing with all the topics closest to his heart: love, death, old age, ambition, the poet's craft, and of course the history and destiny of Ireland.

Treasury of 64 tales invites readers into the shadowy, twilight world of Celtic myth and legend. Mischievous fairy people, murderous giants, priests, devils, and druids star in such stories as "The Soul Cages," "The Black Lamb," "The Horned Women," "The Phantom Isle," and more. Introduction, Notes by W. B. Yeats.

The third volume of a three volume edition of the collected papers and notebooks which comprise the "automatic writing" of W. B. Yeats. The material presented here is taken from the writings known as "the sleep and dreams" notebooks, the "vision" notebooks one and two and from Yeats' card files.

This new edition of The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats includes all of the poems authorised for publication by Yeats in his lifetime. From skilful retellings of ancient Irish myths and legends to passionate meditations on the demands and rewards of youth and old age, these exquisite, occasionally whimsical songs of love, nature and art stand in dramatic contrast to the sombre and angry poems of life in a nation torn by war and uprising. In the rich and recurrent imagery of the rose, the gyre and the tower the reader can trace Yeats's quest to unite intellect and artistry in a single compelling vision. Included in this edition are Yeats's notes complemented by explanatory notes from the esteemed Yeats scholar Richard J. Finneran.