The Poems of W.B. Yeats by McDonald, Peter;

Short description:

In this multi-volume edition, the poetry of W.B. Yeats is presented in full, with newly-established texts and detailed commentary. In this volume, Yeats’s poetry of the first decade on the twentieth century is brought into sharp focus, revealing the extent of his efforts to re-fashion a style that had already made him a well-known poet.

Long description:

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. 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 This edition of Yeats’s poetry presents all his verse, both published and unpublished, including a generous selection of textual variants from the many manuscript and printed sources.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 Yeats’s 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.

In this third volume, Yeats’s poetry of the first decade of the twentieth century is brought into sharp focus, revealing the extent of his efforts to re-fashion a style that had already made him a well-known poet. All of the major modes in Yeats’s earlier work are subject to radical re-imagining in these years, from poetic narrative founded in Irish myth, in poems such as ‘Baile and Aillinn’ and ‘The Old Age of Queen Maeve’, to the symbolist drama-poetry of The Shadowy Waters, here edited in its two (completely different) versions of 1900 and 1906. In a decade when the theatre was one of Yeats’s principal concerns, his lyric poems, which were becoming increasingly explicit in personal terms, began to discover new intensities of conversational pitch and mythic resonance. Poems such as ‘The Folly of Being Comforted’, ‘Adam’s Curse’, ‘No Second Troy’, and ‘The Fascination of What’s Difficult’ are given close attention in this new edition, alongside topical and epigrammatic pieces that are often passed over in accounts of Yeats’s development. The evolving complexities of Yeats’s personal and political lives are crucial to his artistic growth in these years, and the commentary gives these generous attention, showing how the poetry both feeds upon and often transcends the circumstances of its composition. The volume offers strong evidence for this decade as a crucial one in Yeats’s poetic life, in which the poet created wholly new registers for his verse as well as new dimensions for his imaginative vision.

Table of Contents:

A Note From the General Editors

THE POEMS

185 The Song of Heffernan the Blind: A Translation

186 The Shadowy Waters (1900)

187 The Withering of the Boughs

188 Under the Moon

189 [‘I walked among the Seven Woods of Coole’]

190 Baile and Aillinn

191 Yellow Haired Donough

192 [‘Do not make a great keening’]

193 The Blood Bond

194 Spinning Song

195 The Folly of Being Comforted

196 The Players ask for a Blessing on the Psalteries and on Themselves

197 The Arrow

198 Red Hanrahan’s Song about Ireland

199 The Old Men Admiring Themselves in the Water

200 In the Seven Woods

201 The Old Age of Queen Maeve

202 Adam’s Curse

203 The Happy Townland

204 O Do Not Love Too Long

205 [‘I heard under a ragged hollow wood’]

206 Old Memory

207 Never give all the heart

208 Song from Deirdre I

209 The Ragged Wood

210 The Harp of Aengus

211 The Shadowy Waters

212 [‘Come ride and ride to the garden’]

213 Against Witchcraft

214 Song from Deirdre III

215 Song from Deirdre II

216 [‘The friends that have it I do wrong’]

217 Maid Quiet

218 [‘O Death’s old bony finger’]

219 An Appointment

220 [‘Accursed who brings to light of day’]

221 His Dream

222 All things can tempt me

223 At Galway races

224 Reconciliation

225 No Second Troy

226 Words

227 [‘My dear is angry that of late’]

228 On a certain middle-aged office holder

229 A Friend’s illness

230 On George Moore

231 The Coming of Wisdom with Time

232 To a Poet, who would have me Praise certain Bad Poets, Imitators of His and Mine

233 Upon a House Shaken by the Land Agitation

234 The Fascination of What’s Difficult

235 [‘Irishmen, if they prefer’]

236 King and No King

237 A drinking song

238 On those that hated ‘The Playboy of the Western World’, 1907

239 A Woman Homer Sung

240 Peace

241 Against Unworthy Praise

242 These are the Clouds

243 The Mask

244 [‘But every powerful life goes on its way…’]

245 Brown Penny

Appendix 1: Contents of W.B. Yeats’s Volumes of Poetry, 1899-1910

Appendix 2: Prefatory Material by W.B. Yeats in Collections of Poetry, 1899-1910