ABSTRACT

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 This edition of Yeats’s poetry presents all his verse, both published and unpublished, including a generous selection of textual variants from the many manuscript and printed sources.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

This first volume collects Yeats’s 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 Yeats’s work through the 1880s, an adolescent poet’s youthful absorption in Romantic poetry is replaced by a commitment to esoteric religious speculation and Irish political nationalism. This edition allows readers to see Yeats’s 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 Yeats’s 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’, Yeats’s poetry is displayed here in unprecedented fullness and detail.

part |702 pages

The Poems

chapter 2|2 pages

The Old Grey Man

chapter 3|4 pages

Child's Play

chapter 7|1 pages

The Priest of Pan

chapter 9|7 pages

Pan

chapter 11|3 pages

Sunrise

chapter 12|1 pages

The Dell

chapter 14|2 pages

[Dramatic Fragment]

chapter 15|39 pages

Vivien and Time

chapter 23|2 pages

[‘Behold the Man’]

chapter 26|95 pages

Love and Death

chapter 28|2 pages

Song of the Faeries

chapter 31|1 pages

[Love and Sorrow]

chapter 32|33 pages

Mosada

chapter 34|2 pages

The Magpie

chapter 35|74 pages

The Island of Statues

An Arcadian Faery Tale – in Two Acts

chapter 39|7 pages

Love's Decay

chapter 40|1 pages

The Field Mouse

chapter 41|5 pages

Time and the Witch Vivien

chapter 43|2 pages

An Old and Solitary One

chapter 44|2 pages

A Song of Sunset

chapter 45|2 pages

Love and Death

chapter 48|10 pages

The Seeker

A Dramatic Poem – In Two Scenes

chapter 50|1 pages

In a Drawing-Room

chapter 51|2 pages

Life

chapter 52|5 pages

The Sad Shepherd

chapter 53|8 pages

The Two Titans

A Political Poem

chapter 55|6 pages

The Priest and the Fairy

chapter 56|4 pages

Kanva on Himself

chapter 59|3 pages

The Falling of the Leaves

chapter 60|9 pages

The Stolen Child

chapter 61|4 pages

To – (Remembrance)

chapter 62|2 pages

The Indian Upon God

chapter 63|3 pages

An Indian Song

chapter 64|3 pages

Song of Spanish Insurgents

chapter 65|3 pages

Quatrains and Aphorisms

chapter 66|4 pages

The Fairy Pedant

chapter 67|3 pages

A Dawn-Song

chapter 68|8 pages

Anashuya and Vijaya

chapter 69|11 pages

King Goll

An Irish Legend

chapter 71|8 pages

The Ballad of Moll Magee

chapter 72|15 pages

How Ferencz Renyi Kept Silent

Hungary, 1848

chapter 73|3 pages

Love Song

From the Gaelic

chapter 74|3 pages

She Who Dwelt Among the Sycamores

A Fancy

chapter 75|8 pages

The Protestants' Leap

chapter 76|6 pages

Ephemera

chapter 77|3 pages

The Fairy Doctor

chapter 78|2 pages

Girl's Song

chapter 82|7 pages

King Goll (Third Century)

chapter 83|3 pages

A Legend

chapter 84|6 pages

Down by the Salley Gardens

chapter 85|6 pages

The Ballad of Father O'Hart

chapter 86|7 pages

The Phantom Ship

chapter 87|5 pages

Street Dancers

chapter 88|3 pages

To an Isle in the Water

chapter 89|17 pages

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

chapter 90|2 pages

In the Firelight

chapter 91|6 pages

The Outlaw's Bridal

Ireland, 16**

chapter 92|2 pages

In Church

chapter 93|2 pages

A Summer Evening

chapter 94|7 pages

The Ballad of the Foxhunter

chapter 95|5 pages

Who Goes With Fergus?