In this multi-volume edition, the poetry of W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) is presented in full, with newly-established texts and detailed, wide-ranging commentary.
In this multi-volume edition, the poetry of W.B. Yeats (18651939) is presented in full, with newly-established texts and detailed, wide-ranging commentary. Yeats began to write verse in the nineteenth century, and over time his own arrangements of poems repeatedly revised and rearranged both texts and canon. This edition of Yeatss poetry presents all his verse, both published and unpublished, including a generous selection of textual variants from the many manuscript and printed sources. The edition also supplies the most extensive commentary on Yeatss poetry to date, explaining specific references, and setting poems in their contexts; it also gives an account of the vast range of both literary and historical influences at work on the verse. The poems are presented in order of composition, and major revisions or rewritings of poems result in separate inclusions (in chronological sequence) for these writings as they were subsequently reconceived by the poet.
This first volume collects Yeatss poetry of the 1880s, from his ambitious and extensive juvenilia (including hitherto little-noticed dramatic poems) to his earliest published pieces, leading to his first substantial book of verse. The pastoral romance of classically-inflected early work like The Island of Statues is succeeded in these years by the Irish mythic material that finds its largest canvas in the mini-epic The Wanderings of Oisin. In Yeatss work through the 1880s, an adolescent poets youthful absorption in Romantic poetry is replaced by a commitment to esoteric religious speculation and Irish political nationalism. This edition allows readers to see Yeatss emergence as a poet step by step in compelling detail in relation to his literary influences including, significantly, the Anglo-Irish poetry of the nineteenth century. The commentary provides an extensive view of Yeatss developing personal, cultural, and historical worlds as the poems gain in maturity and depth. From the first attempts at verse of a teenage boy to the fully accomplished writings of an original poet standing on the verge of popular success with poems such as The Lake Isle of Innisfree, Yeatss poetry is displayed here in unprecedented fullness and detail.
1. [ A Flower Has Blossomed]
2. The Old Grey Man
3. Childs Play
4.
[ I Sat Upon a High Gnarled Root]
5. [ A Double Moon or More Ago]
6.
[ Fragment of Opening Scene of an Abandoned Verse-Play]
7. The Priest of Pan
8. Inscription for a Christmas Card
9. Pan
10. [ The World is but a Strange
Romance]
11. Sunrise
12. The Dell
13. [ Tower Wind-Beaten, Grim]
14.
[ Dramatic Fragment]
15. Vivien and Time
16. [ As Me Upon My Way the Tram-Car
Whirled]
17. [ Death Hath Taen My Child to Nurse]
18. [ My Song Thou
Knowest of a Dreaming Castle]
19. [ Speech From the Opening of an Abandoned
Dramatic Poem]
20. [ When to Its End Oer-Ripened July Nears]
21. Fragment
(I Raise to Thee No Praying Voice...)
22. [ The Children Play in White and
Red]
23. [ Behold the Man]
24. [ A Soul of the Fountain Spake Me a Word]
25. [ A Sound Came Floating, an Unearthly Sound]
26. Love and Death
27.
Unused scene from Love and Death
28. Song of the Faeries
29. [ Mong Meadows
of Sweet Grain]
30. Sansloy Sansfoy Sansjoy
31. [ Love and Sorrow]
32.
Mosada
33. [ For Clapping Hands of All Mens Love]
34. The Magpie
35. The
Island of Statues: An Arcadian Faery Tale in Two Acts
36. The Cloak, the
Boat, and the Shoes
37. [ Truth Is Bold, But Falsehood Fears ]
38. Fragment
(And Helens Eyes)
39. Loves Decay
40. The Field Mouse
41. Time and the
Witch Vivien
42. [ Hushed in the Vale of Dajestan]
43. An Old and Solitary
One
44. A Song of Sunset
45. Love and Death
46. [ The Dew Comes Dropping]
47. From The Village of the Elms
48. The Seeker: A Dramatic Poem In Two
Scenes
49. The Song of the Happy Shepherd
50. In a Drawing-Room
51. Life
52.
The Sad Shepherd
53. The Two Titans: A Political Poem
54. [ There Sings a
Rose by the Rim]
55. The Priest and the Fairy
56. Kanva on Himself
57. On
Mr. Nettleships Picture at the Royal Hibernian Academy
58. The Meditation of
the Old Fisherman
59. The Falling of the Leaves
60. The Stolen Child
61. To
(Remembrance)
62. The Indian Upon God
63. An Indian Song
64. Song of Spanish
Insurgents
65. Quatrains and Aphorisms
66. The Fairy Pedant
67. A Dawn-Song
68. Anashuya and Vijaya
69. King Goll: An Irish Legend
70. [ How Beautiful
Thy Colours Are]
71. The Ballad of Moll Magee
72. How Ferencz Renya Kept
Silent: Hungary, 1848
73. Love Song: From the Gaelic
74. She Who Dwelt Among
the Sycamores: A Fancy
75. The Protestants Leap
76. Ephemera
77. The Fairy
Doctor
78. Girls Song
79. [ Wherever in the Wastes of Wrinkling Sand]
80. A
Lovers Quarrel Among the Fairies
81. The Wanderings of Oisin and How a Demon
Trapped Him
82. King Goll (Third Century)
83. A Legend
84. Down by the Salley
Gardens
85. The Ballad of Father O Hart
86. The Phantom Ship
87. Street
Dancers
88. To an Isle in the Water
89. The Lake Isle of Innisfree
90. In the
Firelight
91. The Outlaws Bridal: Ireland, 16**
92. In Church
93. A Summer
Evening
94. The Ballad of the Foxhunter
95. Who Goes with Fergus? Appendix 1:
Contents of The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889) Appendix 2:
Initial prose draft of The Island of Statues
Peter McDonald is an Irish poet and critic, whose literary criticism includes Serious Poetry: Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill (2002) and Sound Intentions: The Workings of Rhyme in Nineteenth-Century Poetry (2012). He has edited the Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice, and is the author of numerous articles on nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry. His own Collected Poems appeared in 2012. He is Professor of British and Irish Poetry at the University of Oxford, and Christopher Tower Student and Tutor in Poetry at Christ Church, Oxford.
