"The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume X: Later Articles and
Reviews" is part of a fourteen-volume series under the general
editorship of eminent Yeats scholars Richard J. Finneran and George
Mills Harper. This first complete edition includes virtually all of
the Nobel laureate's published work, in authoritative texts and
with extensive explanatory notes.
"Later Articles and Reviews" consists of fifty-four prose pieces
published between 1900 and Yeats's death in January 1939 and
benefits from the notes and emendations of Yeats scholar Colton
Johnson. The pieces collected here are occasional, and they reflect
the many interests and engagements of Yeats in his maturity. No
longer a reviewer or polemicist, Yeats is an international figure:
a senator in the fledgling Irish state, a defining modern poet, a
distinguished essayist. And here we have him writing -- with grace,
wit, and passion -- on the state of Ireland in the world, on Irish
language and Irish literature, on his artistic contemporaries, on
the Abbey Theater, on divorce, on censorship, on his evolution as a
poet and dramatist, on his own poetry.
"Volume X" also includes texts of ten radio programs Yeats
broadcast between 1931 and 1937. This is not only the first
collection but also the first printing of Yeats's radio work, which
constitutes the largest previously uncollected body of his writings
and possibly the most important to remain largely unstudied.
Carefully assembled from manuscripts, typescripts, broadcast
scripts, and fragmentary recordings, the programs range from a
scripted interview on contemporary issues to elaborate stagings of
his own and others' poetry. One of the radio programs is presented
in an appendix complete with the commissioned musical score that
set Yeats's poetry to music, Yeats's own emendations on the BBC
broadcast script, and the diacritical notes with which the
broadcast reader indicated Yeats's interpretive instructions.
Here, then, is seasoned Yeats, writing and speaking vigorously
and with keen personal insight about the modern age and his place
in it.