William Butler Yeats

The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume II: The Plays is part of a fourteen-volume series under the general editorship of eminent Yeats scholars Richard J. Finneran and George Mills Harper. This complete edition includes virtually all of the Nobel laureate's published work, in authoritative texts and with extensive explanatory notes. The Plays, edited by David R. Clark and Rosalind E. Clark, is the first-ever complete collection of Yeats's plays that honors the order in which the plays first appeared. It provides the latest and most accurate texts in Yeats's lifetime, as well as extensive editorial notes and emendations. Though best known as one of the most important poets of the twentieth century, from the beginning of his career William Butler Yeats understood the value of his plays and his poetry to be the same. In 1923, when he accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature, Yeats suggested that "perhaps the English committees would never have sent you my name if I had written no plays...if my lyric poetry had not a quality of speech practiced on the stage." Indeed, Yeats's great achievement in poetry should not be allowed to obscure his impressive and innovative accomplishments as a dramatist. In The Plays, David and Rosalind Clark have restored the plays to the final order in which Yeats planned for them to be published. This volume opens with Yeats's introduction for an unpublished Scribner collection and encompasses all of his dramatic work, from The Countess Cathleen to The Death of Cuchulain. The Plays enables readers to see clearly, for the first time, the ways in which Yeats's very different dramatic forms evolved over the course of his life, and to appreciate fully the importance of drama in the oeuvre of this greatest of modern poets.

The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume VIII: The Irish Dramatic Movement is part of a fourteen-volume series under the general editorship of eminent Yeats scholars Richard J. Finneran and George Mills Harper. This complete edition includes virtually all of the Nobel laureate's published work, in authoritative texts and with extensive explanatory notes. Edited by the distinguished Yeats scholars Mary FitzGerald and Richard J. Finneran, The Irish Dramatic Movement gathers together -- for the first time -- all of the poet's time-honored essays on drama and the groundbreaking movement that led to the enduring Irish theater of today. Although the reputation of W. B. Yeats as one of the preeminent writers of the twentieth century rests primarily on his poetry, drama and the theatre were among his abiding concerns. Indeed, in 1917 he wrote, "I need a theatre; I believe myself to be a dramatist." Here in this volume is the collection of all his major dramatic criticism for the years 1899-1919, including previously uncollected material. A practicing dramatist himself, Yeats had strong convictions about the goals of the Irish theater and the appropriate plays to be produced. The essays in this collection address many topics, from the turbulent early years of what became the Abbey Theatre to the controversies over the plays of John Millington Synge and the relationship between drama and nationalism. Also evident are Yeats's judgments on numerous plays, playwrights, and productions, both in Irish and in English. FitzGerald and Finneran's volume includes an Introduction and a History of the Text, as well as copious but unobtrusive annotation. The Irish Dramatic Movement is an essential volume for both readers of Yeats and students of the early years of twentieth-century theater.

Prefaces and Introductions, Volume VI of The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, brings together for the first time thirty-two introductions by Yeats to the works of such literary greats as William Blake, J. M. Synge, Lady Gregory, Oscar Wilde, Oliver St. John Gogarty, Lionel Johnson, and Rabindranath Tagore. The introductions, which span the Nobel laureate's entire career, reflect the broad reach of Yeats's literary and cultural interests. Always insightful and often charming, Prefaces and Introductions reveals the breadth of Yeats's talent as essayist, critic, folklorist, and raconteur.

Three Irish Plays is a collection of three plays by J. M. Synge, a prominent Irish playwright of the early 20th century. The first play, The Land of Heart's Desire, tells the story of a young couple who are visited by fairies in their home in rural Ireland. The second play, The Twisting of the Rope, is a tragic tale of a young man who is falsely accused of stealing a sheep and is executed as a result. The final play, Riders to the Sea, is a haunting portrayal of the lives of a family living on the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland, as they struggle to come to terms with the death of their loved ones at sea. These three plays are considered some of Synge's finest works and are celebrated for their portrayal of Irish culture and the beauty of the Irish landscape. Introduction By Harrison Hale Schaff. This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.

First published in 1891, John Sherman and Dhoya was Yeats's third separate publication. The stories were revised and reprinted in the 1908 Collected Works in Verse and Prose but not published again in Yeats's lifetime. John Sherman, Yeats's only completed attempt at realistic fiction, details the title character's dilemma: He must choose between life in London and marriage to Margaret Leland, an English girl, and life in Ireland and marriage to a childhood sweetheart, Mary Carton. In addition to containing numerous autobiographical elements (for instance, the town of Ballah is modeled on Yeats's Sligo), the novelette treats many of Yeats's persistent themes, such as the debate between nationality and cosmopolitanism and the conflict between what he would later call the Self and the Anti-Self. In the end, Sherman reaffirms his Irish roots, and Margaret Leland's affections are transferred to Sherman's friend, the Reverend William Howard. Dhoya, a mythological tale set in the remote past, depicts a liasion between a mortal and a fairy, a motif that Yeats used in many other works. Describing the inevitable conflict between a world of perfection and the mortal world, the short story suggests that "only the changing, and moody, and angry, and weary can love." Well received by most contemporary reviewers, John Sherman and Dhoya are important both as works of fiction and as indications of the fundamental continuity of subject and theme in Yeats's career. This edition offers an accurate text, an introduction, and explanatory notes.

W. B. Yeats's The Winding Stair and Other Poems was published in 1933 when Yeats was sixty-eight, ten years after he won the Nobel Prize and six years before his death in 1939. Yeats famously invoked in "Adam's Curse" the time he spent "stitching and unstitching" the lines of his work, but he also spent considerable time stitching and unstitching his poems to each other. The Winding Stair demonstrates that care, combining and reordering the poems of two earlier publications in an edition intended as the companion volume to The Tower, published in 1928. This Scribner facsimile edition reproduces exactly the pages of the elegantly planned and designed first edition of The Winding Stair and Other Poems as it first appeared, including a photo of the cover design on which Yeats collaborated. It adds an introduction and notes by celebrated Yeats scholar George Bornstein. Yeats's longest separate volume of verse, it features sixty-four poems written in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Among them are such masterpieces as "Blood and the Moon," "Byzantium," the Coole Park poems, "Vacillation," and two separately titled long sequences ending with the exquisite lyric "From the 'Antigone.'" These poems amply justify T. S. Eliot's contention that Yeats was one of the few poets "whose history is the history of their own time, who are a part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them."

"The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume X: Later Articles and Reviews" is part of a fourteen-volume series under the general editorship of eminent Yeats scholars Richard J. Finneran and George Mills Harper. This first complete edition includes virtually all of the Nobel laureate's published work, in authoritative texts and with extensive explanatory notes. "Later Articles and Reviews" consists of fifty-four prose pieces published between 1900 and Yeats's death in January 1939 and benefits from the notes and emendations of Yeats scholar Colton Johnson. The pieces collected here are occasional, and they reflect the many interests and engagements of Yeats in his maturity. No longer a reviewer or polemicist, Yeats is an international figure: a senator in the fledgling Irish state, a defining modern poet, a distinguished essayist. And here we have him writing -- with grace, wit, and passion -- on the state of Ireland in the world, on Irish language and Irish literature, on his artistic contemporaries, on the Abbey Theater, on divorce, on censorship, on his evolution as a poet and dramatist, on his own poetry. "Volume X" also includes texts of ten radio programs Yeats broadcast between 1931 and 1937. This is not only the first collection but also the first printing of Yeats's radio work, which constitutes the largest previously uncollected body of his writings and possibly the most important to remain largely unstudied. Carefully assembled from manuscripts, typescripts, broadcast scripts, and fragmentary recordings, the programs range from a scripted interview on contemporary issues to elaborate stagings of his own and others' poetry. One of the radio programs is presented in an appendix complete with the commissioned musical score that set Yeats's poetry to music, Yeats's own emendations on the BBC broadcast script, and the diacritical notes with which the broadcast reader indicated Yeats's interpretive instructions. Here, then, is seasoned Yeats, writing and speaking vigorously and with keen personal insight about the modern age and his place in it.

W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) began writing poetry as a devotee of Blake, Shelley, the pre-Raphaelites, and of nineteenth-century Irish poets including James Clarence Mangan and Samuel Ferguson. By the end of his life, he had, as T. S. Eliot said, created a poetic language for the twentieth century. The First Yeats deepens our understanding of the making of that poetic imagination, reprinting the original texts of Yeats's three early collections, The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1899), The Countess of Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (1892), and The Wind Among the Reeds (1899). The poems were subsequently heavily revised or discarded. Among them are some of the best-loved poems in English – 'The LakeIsle of Innisfree', 'He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven' – fresh and unfamiliar here in their original contexts, together with Yeats's lengthy notes which were drastically cut in the collected editions. This illuminating edition by Edward Larrissy, editor of W. B. Yeats, The Major Works (Oxford University Press, 2000), includes an introduction that clarifies the literary, historical and intellectual context of the poems, detailed notes, and a bibliography. It offers essential material for reading –and revaluing – one of the great modern poets. Cover image: Front cover of The Wind Among the Reeds (4th edn, Elkin Matthews 1903) by Althea Gyles(detail). Copyright © The British Library Board 2010. All rights reserved. Cover design StephenRaw.com