The winding stair (1929)

In 1929 W. B. Yeats published a collection of poems titled The Winding Stair. Four years later he combined this collection with his 1932 work, Words for Music Perhaps, to form The Winding Stair and Other Poems. The Cornell Yeats edition of The Winding Stair brings together transcriptions of all extant manuscript materials for the six poems included in the 1929 volume. It provides an apparatus showing variants and includes a generous number of facsimiles. An introduction by David R. Clark traces the evolution of each poem up through the 1933 volume. The Winding Stair reflects Yeats's continuing meditations on the fate of Irish politics and culture. Included in this volume are his elegy for two Irish political activists, "In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz"; his stirring tributes - "Death" and "Blood and the Moon" - to the assassinated political leader Kevin O'Higgins; and his eleven-part sequence, "A Woman Young and Old." In these poems Yeats continues to elaborate the cosmic, public, and personal themes that he had been exploring for over a decade.