The Cornell Yeats

lvi, 471 p. ; 25 cm

"Yeats is a poet as much of fact as of feeling. Every work of his has a source - whether from folklore, legend, mythology, the occult, or history: each a source that for him had a definite objective reality. The demands of this world and of that other world of Yeatsian spiritual reality often conflict. His play The Only Jealousy of Emer, particularly in its early drafts, offers a vivid portrayal of such a struggle. It marks one of the turning points of Yeats's career, because in its final form it is a synthesis of two profound experiences that were to shape his later work: his marriage to Georgie Hyde-Lees in 1917 brought him a certain degree of contentment with the joys of this world, while her automatic script provided a philosophical framework for his poems and plays."--BOOK JACKET.

Published during the blossoming of Yeats's maturity, between The Wild Swans at Coole (1919) and The Tower (1928), Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1920) includes poems that confronted central political, personal, and philosophical issues. This volume presents all the extant manuscripts for the poems in the collection, which Yeats wrote between 1914 and 1919, a critical period that included his marriage.

"The second and last of a series of four adaptations from the Japanese Noh theater, "The Dreaming of the Bones" and "Calvary" were paired in their first printing together in Four Plays for Dancers. In writing these one-act plays, Yeats worked through for himself the psychology of betrayal and its consequences for humanity. This book reproduces the complete set of extant manuscripts that preceded publication of both plays. In addition to a perceptive introductory essay, the book includes several appendixes of Yeats's notes and commentaries on the plays from their preparation in 1921 onward."--BOOK JACKET.

"Of the twenty-one poems here, eighteen are called songs. Only "Parnell's Funeral" itself is un-songlike, a somber and powerful declaration made by a Parnellite. Each poem is accompanied by comments on its content and its manuscripts. Ninety-nine illustrations show Yeats's handwritten drafts, typescripts, and revisions. Because of the poems' exotic references, a long section of the introduction provides relevant material from Yeats's letters and commentary and an independent analysis of each poem."--Jacket.

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.

"Most of the poems collected in The Wild Swans at Coole were written between 1915 and 1918, a critical period in Yeats's adult life. First published in 1917 in a volume including twenty-three poems and a play, The Wild Swans at Coole was reissued in 1919 without the play and with seventeen additional poems. The Cornell Yeats edition includes transcriptions of manuscript materials for the poems in both collections, accompanied by a generous number of facsimiles." "The years during which Yeats composed The Wild Swans at Coole witnessed the painful drama of his successive proposals of marriage, first to Maud Gonne and then to her daughter Iseult. Rejected by both, he abruptly married Georgie Hyde-Lees. Yeats's new wife developed the practice of "automatic writing," thereby introducing him to a liberating world of mystical communication which he would further explore in A Vision."--BOOK JACKET.

"Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems (1932) has been called W. B. Yeats's finest single volume. It features not only the great series for which it is named - a series that includes the Crazy Jane poems - but also single poems such as "Byzantium" and "Coole Park, 1929." This edition records every draft, from Yeats's first notion to the published version, a majority both in facsimile (in Yeats's fiercely illegible hand) and in faithful transcription on facing pages. A census of manuscripts identifies the source among Yeats's papers of each draft, and appendixes trace the writing of the poems through notebooks, loose manuscripts, and galley proofs with Yeats's corrections and copious additions."--BOOK JACKET.

"The 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 seance 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 centers on a romantic triangle involving Jonathan Swift and two women, Vanessa and Stella. Yeats's use of a seance 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 The Words Upon the Window Pane, with variant readings from proofs, typescripts, and notebook entries, as well as other materials pertaining to the play's writing, publication, and performance."--BOOK JACKET.