W. B. Yeats: The Early Poetry - Manuscript Materials.
Author: George Bornstein (editor).
Cornell University Press, 1987. 2 volumes. xii, 442pp & xxxiv, 534 pages. Hardbacks.
Volume I: Mosada and The Island of Statues. Volume II: `The Wanderings of Oisin’ and Other Early Poems to 1895.
“I consider the Cornell Yeats one of the most important scholarly projects of our time. This volume will be a revelation even to experienced Yeatsians, since the manuscripts have not been published before (and one, the Canterbury manuscript, was unknown until Bornstein began his work).”—A. Walton Litz, Princeton University.
This third volume in the Cornell Yeats series presents previously unpublished manuscript drafts of two key early dramatic poems by W. B. Yeats, comprising over half the extant manuscripts of his poetry written through 1895. The drafts transcribed here for The Island of Statues, his first published work, and Mosada, his first publication in book form, reveal that Yeats subjected his poetry to laborious revision from the very beginning of his career.
In establishing the record of Yeats’s composition, George Bornstein discovered and incorporated new manuscripts. He has transcribed each successive draft in full, enabling the reader to trace the evolution of the poems without having to master Yeats’s often difficult handwriting. Bornstein’s introduction places the manuscripts of these crucial early works in their literary and biographical contexts, and textual notes explain special problems in decipherment and transcription. One hundred photographic facsimiles reproduce all the Mosada manuscripts, the entire first draft of The Island of Statues, and particularly interesting or difficult pages of other materials.
This volume will deepen our understanding of Yeats’s art and creativity and will interest scholars and students of modern and Victorian poetry as well as of Anglo-Irish literature.
ISBN: 0801418550 (Volume 1)
“The scholarship throughout the volume is impeccable. This edition represents a very substantial addition to our knowledge of Yeats’s art in the 1880s and early 1890s. Bornstein’s introduction is the best account I have seen of the evolution of Yeats’s early poetic canon. The documents and apparatus will be the foundation for major revisions in our view of the early Yeats.”
—A. Walton Litz, Princeton University
This is the second of two volumes containing transcriptions and in many cases facsimiles of all surviving manuscripts of the poetry that Yeats had published by 1895, together with the later revisions of that poetry. In addition, the volume provides manuscript materials for thirty-eight newly discovered poems that Yeats is not known to have published; over two dozen of these appear here for the first time. The inclusion of so much previously unknown work will significantly alter interpretations of Yeats and of modern poetry more generally.
Whereas Volume I reproduced materials pertaining to the early dramatic verse The Island of Statues and Mosada, Volume II includes the other important poems in Yeats’s first two books of verse, The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems and The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics, and in his 1895 collection, Poems. The nearly four hundred pages of previously unpublished manuscripts include working drafts of some of Yeats’s best-known poems, such as “The Wanderings of Oisin,” “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” “The Two Trees,” and the Rose lyrics.
Most of the newly discovered poems date from the mid-1880s and reveal how Yeats experimented with style, stance, and subject during the crucial years at the beginning of his poetic career. Nine others written in the 1890s display a more polished technique, and many of these address the themes of Yeats’s love for Maud Gonne and his occult interests. The editor’s introduction to this volume will replace the familiar image of the young Yeats as dreamy and apolitical with a more accurate perception of him as a poet highly involved in the political and cultural issues of his day.
GEORGE BORNSTEIN is Professor of English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The author of several books on nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry, he has edited both scholarly collections and primary texts, including The Early Poetry, Volume I: “Mosada” and “The Island of Statues, “Manuscript Materials, also in The Cornell Yeats.
ISBN: 0801428793 (Volume 2)
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