Synopses & Reviews
The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume IV: Early Essays is part of a fourteen-volume series under the general editorship of eminent Yeats scholars George Bornstein and George Mills Harper. These volumes include virtually all of the Nobel laureate's published work, in authoritative texts with extensive explanatory notes.
Early Essays, edited by the internationally esteemed Yeats scholars George Bornstein and the late Richard J. Finneran, includes the contents of the two most important collections of Yeats's critical prose, Ideas of Good and Evil(1903) and The Cutting of an Agate(1912, 1919). Among the seminal essays are considerations of Blake, Shakespeare, Shelley, Spenser, and Synge, as well as an extended discussion of the Japanese Noh theatre. The first scholarly edition of these materials, Early Essays offers a corrected text and detailed annotation of all allusions. Several appendices gather materials from early printings which were later excluded, as well as illuminating black-and-white illustrations.
Early Essays is an essential sourcebook for understanding Yeats's career as both writer and literary critic, and for the development of modern poetry and criticism. Here, Yeats works out many of his key ideas on poetry, politics, and the theater. He gives interpretations of writers critical to his development and presents a compelling vision of Ireland and the modern world during the last decade of the nineteenth century and first two decades of the twentieth. As T. S. Eliot remarked, Yeats was one of those 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. This volumedisplays a crucial part of that history.
Synopsis
andlt;iandgt;The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume XIII: A Visionandlt;/iandgt; is part of a fourteen-volume series under the general editorship of eminent Yeats scholar George Bornstein and formerly the late Richard J. Finneran and George Mills Harper. One of the strangest works of literary modernism, andlt;iandgt;A Visionandlt;/iandgt; is Yeats's greatest occult work. andlt;BRandgt; andlt;BRandgt; Edited by Yeats scholars Catherine E. Paul and Margaret Mills Harper, the volume presents the "system" of philosophy, psychology, history, and the life of the soul that Yeats and his wife George (nand#233;e Hyde Lees) received and created by means of mediumistic experiments from 1917 through the early 1920s. Yeats obsessively revised the book, and the revised 1937 version is much more widely available than its predecessor. The original 1925 version of andlt;iandgt;A Visionandlt;/iandgt;, poetic, unpolished, masked in fiction, and close to the excitement of the automatic writing that the Yeatses believed to be its supernatural origin, is presented here in a scholarly edition for the first time. andlt;BRandgt; andlt;BRandgt; The text, minimally corrected to retain the sense of the original, is extensively annotated, with particular attention paid to the relationship between the published book and its complex genetic materials. Indispensable to an understanding of the poet's late work and entrancing on its own merit, andlt;iandgt;A Visionandlt;/iandgt; aims to be, all at once, a work of theoretical history, an esoteric philosophy, an aesthetic symbology, a psychological schema, and a sacred book. It is as difficult as it is essential reading for any student of Yeats.
About the Author
William Butler Yeats is generally considered to be Ireland's greatest poet, living or dead, and one of the most
important literary figures of the twentieth century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923. Catherine E. Paul is Associate Professor of English at Clemson University. She is the author of Poetry in the Museums of Modernism: Yeats, Pound, Moore, Stein and of numerous articles relating to modernist studies. Margaret Mills Harper, a co-editor of Yeats's "Vision" Papers (volumes 3 and 4), is the author of Wisdom of Two: The Spiritual and Literary Collaboration of George and W. B. Yeats, The Aristocracy of Art in Joyce and Wolfe, and numerous articles on Yeats, Irish literature, and literary modernism. She is Professor of English and Women's Studies at Georgia State University.
Table of Contents
Editors' Preface and Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Illustrations
Editors' Introduction
A Vision Dedication
Introduction
Book I -- What the Caliph Partly Learned
Book II -- What the Caliph Refused to Learn
Book III -- Dove or Swan
Book IV -- The Gates of Pluto
Textual Matters and Notes
Notes
Corrections to the Yeatses' Copies of A Vision (1925)
Emendations to the Copy-Text
End-of-Line Word Division in the Copy-Text
Index