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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 first edition of W. B. Yeats's "The Tower" appeared in
bookstores in London on Valentine's Day, 1928. His English
publisher printed just 2,000 copies of this slender volume of
twenty-one poems, priced at six shillings. The book was immediately
embraced by book buyers and critics alike, and it quickly became a
bestseller.
Subsequent versions of the volume made various changes throughout,
but this Scribner facsimile edition reproduces exactly that seminal
first edition as it reached its earliest audience in 1928, adding
an introduction and notes by esteemed Yeats scholar Richard J.
Finneran.
Written between 1912 and 1927, these poems ("Sailing to
Byzantium," "Leda and the Swan," and "Among School Children" among
them) are today considered some of the best and most famous in the
entire Yeats canon. As Virginia Woolf declared in her unsigned
review of this collection, "Mr. Yeats has never written more
exactly and more passionately."
Since its first appearance in 1962, M. L. Rosenthal's classic selection of Yeats's poems and plays has attracted hundreds of thousands of readers. This newly revised edition includes 211 poems and 4 plays. It adds The Words Upon the Window-Pane, one of Yeats's most startling dramatic works in its realistic use of a seance as the setting for an eerily powerful reenactment of Jonathan Swift's rigorous idealism, baffling love relationships, and tragic madness. The collection profits from recent scholarship that has helped to establish Yeats's most reliable texts, in the order set by the poet himself. And his powerful lyrical sequences are amply represented, culminating in the selection from Last Poems and Two Plays, which reaches its climax in the brilliant poetic plays The Death of Cuchulain and Purgatory. Scholars, students, and all who delight in Yeats's varied music and sheer quality will rejoice in this expanded edition. As the introduction observes, "Early and late he has the simple, indispensable gift of enchanting the ear....He was also the poet who, while very much of his own day in Ireland, spoke best to the people of all countries. And though he plunged deep into arcane studies, his themes are most clearly the general ones of life and death, love and hate, man's condition, and history's meanings. He began as a sometimes effete post-Romantic, heir to the pre-Raphaelites, and then, quite naturally, became a leading British Symbolist; but he grew at last into the boldest, most vigorous voice of this century." Selected Poems and Four Plays represents the essential achievement of the greatest twentieth-century poet to write in English.
The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats includes all of the poems authorized by Yeats for inclusion in his standard canon. Breathtaking in range, it encompasses the entire arc of his career, from luminous reworkings of ancient Irish myths and legends to passionate meditations on the demands and rewards of youth and old age, from exquisite, occasionally whimsical songs of love, nature, and art to somber and angry poems of life in a nation torn by war and uprising. In observing the development of rich and recurring images and themes over the course of his body of work, we can trace the quest of this century's greatest poet to unite intellect and artistry in a single magnificent vision. Revised and corrected, this edition includes Yeats's own notes on his poetry, complemented by explanatory notes from esteemed Yeats scholar Richard J. Finneran. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats is the most comprehensive edition of one of the world's most beloved poets available in paperback.
With a new Introduction by Cedric Watts, Research Professor of
English, University of Sussex. W. B. Yeats was Romantic and
Modernist, mystical dreamer and leader of the Irish Literary
Revival, Nobel prizewinner, dramatist and, above all, poet. He
began writing with the intention of putting his 'very self' into
his poems. T. S. Eliot, one of many who proclaimed the Irishman's
greatness, described him as 'one of those few whose history is the
history of their own time, who are part of the consciousness of an
age which cannot be understood without them'. For anyone interested
in the literature of the late nineteenth century and the twentieth
century, Yeats's work is essential. This volume gathers the full
range of his published poetry, from the hauntingly beautiful early
lyrics (by which he is still fondly remembered) to the magnificent
later poems which put beyond question his status as major poet of
modern times. Paradoxical, proud and passionate, Yeats speaks today
as eloquently as ever.
"Criticism" includes twenty-four interpretive essays by T. S.
Eliot, Daniel Albright, Douglas Archibald, Harold Bloom, George
Bornstein, Elizabeth Cullingford, Paul de Man, Richard Ellman, R.
F. Foster, Stephen Gwynn, Seamus Heaney, Marjorie Howes, John
Kelly, Declan Kiberd, Lucy McDiarmid, Michael North, Thomas
Parkinson, Marjorie Perloff, James Pethica, Jahan Ramazani, Ronald
Schuchard, Michael J. Sidnell, Anita Sokolsky, and Helen Vendler. A
Chronology and Selected Bibliography are included.
Gathered by the renowned Irish poet, playwright, and essayist William Butler Yeats, the sixty-five tales and poems in this delightful collection uniquely capture the rich heritage of the Celtic imagination. Filled with legends of village ghosts, fairies, demons, witches, priests, and saints, these stories evoke both tender pathos and lighthearted mirth and embody what Yeats describes as “the very voice of the people, the very pulse of life.”
“The impact of these tales doesn’t stop with Yeats, or Joyce, or Oscar Wilde,” writes Paul Muldoon in his Foreword, “for generations of readers in Ireland and throughout the world have found them flourishing like those persistent fairy thorns.”
Rooted in myth, occult mysteries, and belief in magic, these
stories are populated by a lively cast of sorcerers, fairies,
ghosts, and nature spirits. The great Irish poet heard these
enchanting, mystical tales from Irish peasants, and the stories'
anthropologic significance is matched by their timeless
entertainment value.
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.
MAURTEEN. And maybe it is natural upon May Eve To dream of the good
people. But tell me, girl, If you've the branch of blessed quicken
wood That women hang upon the post of the door That they may send
good luck into the house? Remember they may steal new-married
brides After the fall of twilight on May Eve, Or what old women
mutter at the fire Is but a pack of lies.
Throughout his long life, William Butler Yeats -- Irish writer and premier lyric poet in English in this century -- produced important works in every literary genre, works of astonishing range, energy, erudition, beauty, and skill. His early poetry is memorable and moving. His poems and plays of middle age address the human condition with language that has entered our vocabulary for cataclysmic personal and world events. The writings of his final years offer wisdom, courage, humor, and sheer technical virtuosity. T. S. Eliot pronounced Yeats "the greatest poet of our time -- certainly the greatest in this language, and so far as I am able to judge, in any language" and "one of the few 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 Yeats Reader is the most comprehensive single volume to display the full range of Yeats's talents. It presents more than one hundred and fifty of his best-known poems -- more than any other compendium -- plus eight plays, a sampling of his prose tales, and excerpts from his published autobiographical and critical writings. In addition, an appendix offers six early texts of poems that Yeats later revised. Also included are selections from the memoirs left unpublished at his death and complete introductions written for a projected collection that never came to fruition. These are supplemented by unobtrusive annotation and a chronology of the life. Yeats was a protean writer and thinker, and few writers so thoroughly reward a reader's efforts to essay the whole of their canon. This volume is an excellent place to begin that enterprise, to renew an old acquaintance with one of world literature's great voices, or to continue a lifelong interest in the phenomenon of literary genius.
A re-telling of the Irish saga. When first published, Gregory's
version affected not only Yeats, but every important writer of the
period. George Russell (AE) wrote: "I never expect to read a more
beautiful book...Your story of Deirdre is extraordinarily
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