ABSTRACT
Most substantial testament to Yeats's obsession with himself is inevitably the book known in England as 'Autobiographies' and in America as 'The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats'. Yeats began the book in the January of 1914 and finished it on Christmas Day of the same year. He initially intended to call his book after one of his brother's watercolours, a colour reproduction of which was published in the first trade edition. But 'Memory Harbour: a Revery of Childhood and Youth' gave way to 'Reveries' and finally to the title by which it is known today. The preface and conclusion of 'Reveries' are in intimate relationship one with another; they represent a reversion away from the quietly heroic self-aggrandizement of life into legend, in a characteristically Yeatsian self-criticism of an enterprise. That has been effectively accomplished, and thus makes the book as a systematic assemblage of what we might call contemplations that have a moral.
