Yeats' Poetry, Drama, and Prose : Authoritive Texts, Contexts, Criticism

This brand new collection, impeccably edited by James Pethica, presents a comprehensive selection of Yeats's major contributions in poetry, drama, prose fiction, autobiography, and criticism.

Criticism includes twenty-four interpretive essays by T. S. Eliot, Daniel Albright, Douglas Archibald, Harold Bloom, George Bornstein, Elizabeth Cullingford, Paul de Man, Richard Ellman, R. F. Foster, Stephen Gwynn, Seamus Heaney, Marjorie Howes, John Kelly, Declan Kiberd, Lucy McDiarmid, Michael North, Thomas Parkinson, Marjorie Perloff, James Pethica, Jahan Ramazani, Ronald Schuchard, Michael J. Sidnell, Anita Sokolsky, and Helen Vendler.

A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are included.

Introduction
A Note on the Texts
Acknowledgements

POEMS
From Crossways (1889)
The Song of the Happy Shepherd
The Sad Shepherd
The Cloak, the Boat, and the Shoes
The Indian to His Love
The Falling of the Leaves
Ephemera (2 versions)
The Stolen Child
To an Isle in the Water
Down by the Salley Gardens
The Meditation of the Old Fisherman
From The Rose (1892)
To the Rose upon the Rood of Time
Fergus and the Druid
The Rose of the World
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
The Pity of Love
The Sorrow of Love (2 versions)
When You are Old
The White Birds
[Who goes with Fergus?]
The Dedication to a Book of Stories selected from the Irish Novelists (2 versions)
The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner (2 versions)
To Ireland in the Coming Times
From The Wind Among the Reeds (1899)
The Hosting of the Sidhe
The Lover tells of the Rose in his Heart
The Fisherman [The Fish]
The Song of Wandering Aengus
The Lover mourns for the Loss of Love
He reproves the Curlew
He remembers Forgotten Beauty
A Poet to his Beloved
He gives his Beloved certain Rhymes
To my Heart, bidding it have no Fear
The Cap and Bells
He hears the Cry of the Sedge
He thinks of those who have Spoken Evil of his Beloved
The Lover pleads with his Friend for Old Friends
He wishes his Beloved were Dead
He wished for the Cloths of Heaven
From In The Seven Woods (1903)
In the Seven Woods
The Arrow
The Folly of Being Comforted
Never Give all the Heart
Adam’s Curse
Red Hanrahan’s Song about Ireland
The Old Men Admiring Themselves in the Water
O Do Not Love Too Long
From The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910)
His Dream
A Woman Homer Sung
The Consolation [Words]
No Second Troy
Reconciliation
The Fascination of What’s Difficult
A Drinking Song
The Coming of Wisdom with Time
On hearing that the Students of our New University have joined the Ancient Order of Hibernians and
the Agitation against Immoral Literature
To a Poet, who would have me Praise certain Bad Poets, Imitators of His and Mine
The Mask
Upon a House shaken by the Land Agitation
All Things can Tempt Me
The Young Man’s Song [Brown Penny]
From Responsibilities (1914)
[Introductory Rhymes]
To a Wealthy Man who promised a Second Subscription to the Dublin Municipal Gallery if it were
proved the People wanted Pictures
September 1913
To a Friend whose Work has come to Nothing
Paudeen
The Three Beggars
Beggar to Beggar Cried
I. The Witch
II. The Peacock
To a Child Dancing in the Wind
[Two Years Later]
Fallen Majesty
Friends
The Cold Heaven
The Magi
The Dolls
A Coat
[Closing Rhymes]
From The Wild Swans at Coole (1917)
The Wild Swans at Coole
In Memory of Major Robert Gregory
An Irish Airman Forsees his Death
Men Improve with the Years
The Living Beauty
A Song
The Scholars (2 versions)
Lines Written in Dejection
One Woman
The Fisherman
The People
Broken Dreams
The Balloon of the Mind
On being asked for a War Poem
Ego Dominus Tuus
The Double Vision of Michael Robartes
From Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921)
Michael Robartes and the Dancer
Easter, 1916
On a Political Prisoner
The Second Coming
A Prayer for my Daughter
To be Carved on a Stone at Thoor Ballylee
From The Tower (1928)
Sailing to Byzantium
The Tower
Meditation in Time of Civil War
Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen
A Prayer for my Son
Leda and the Swan
Among School Children
All Souls’ Night
From The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933)
In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz
A Dialogue of Self and Soul
Blood and the Moon
Coole Park, 1929
The Choice
Byzantium
Vacillation
Crazy Jane talks with the Bishop
Father and Child
From A Full Moon in March (1935)
A Prayer for Old Age
The Four Ages of Man
From New Poems (1938)
The Gyres
Lapis Lazuli
Imitated from the Japanese
What Then?
Beautiful Lofty Things
Come Gather Round Me Parnellites
The Great Day
Parnell
The Spur
The Municipal Gallery Re-visited
From Last Poems (1939)
Under Ben Bulben
The Black Tower
Long-legged Fly
High Talk
Man and the Echo
The Circus Animals’ Desertion
Politics

PLAYS
Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902)
On Baile’s Strand (1903)
At the Hawk’s Well (1917)
Purgatory (1939)

PROSE
Prose Fiction and Folklore Writings
From The Celtic Twilight (1893)
This Book
Belief and Unbelief
Drumcliff and Rosses
From The Celtic Twilight (1902)
‘Dust hath closed Helen’s Eye’
Enchanted Woods
Bye the Roadside
From The Secret Rose (1897)
The Crucifixtion of the Outcast
The Old Men of the Twilight
From Stories of Red Hanrahan (1904)
The Twisting of the Rope
The Death of Hanrahan
Autobiographical Writings
From Reveries Over Childhood and Youth (1916)
From The Trembling of the Veil (1922)
From Book I. Four Years: 1887-1891
From Book II. Ireland after Parnell
From Memoirs: Autobiography (written 1916-17, published 1972)
From The Trembling of the Veil (1922)
From Book III. Hodos Chameliontos
From Book IV. The Tragic Generation
From Book V. The Stirring of the Bones
From Dramatis Personae, 1896-1902 (1935)
From Memoirs: Journal (written 1909, published 1972)
From Pages from a Diary Written in Nineteen Hundred and Thirty (1944)
Critical Writings
Hopes and Fears for Irish Literature (1892)
The De-Anglicising of Ireland (1892)
From The Message of the Folk-lorist (1893)
From The Celtic Element in Literature (1898)
The Irish Literary Theatre (1899)
From Irish Language and the Irish Literature (1900)
From The Symbolism of Poetry (1900)
From Magic (1901)
The Reform of the Theatre (1903)
On Taking ‘The Playboy’ to London (1907)
The Play of Modern Manners (1908)
A Tower on the Apennines (1908)
From Poetry and Tradition (1908)
From First Principles (1908)
From Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1918)
From Anima Hominis
From Anima Mundi
From A People’s Theatre (1919)
From The Bounty of Sweden (1925)
From Introduction to The Oxford Book of Yeats’s Collected Works (1936)
From A Vision (1937)
From Introduction
From Book I: The Great Wheel
Essays for the Scribner Edition of Yeats’s Collected Works (1937)
Introduction
From Introduction to Essays
Introduction to Plays
From On the Boiler (1939)
From Preliminaries
From To-morrow’s Revolution

CRITICISM
Criticism by Yeats’s Contemporaries
Oscar Wilde – [Review of The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems]
Arthur Symons – [Review of Poems (1899) and The Wind Among the Reeds]
Ezra Pound – [Review of Responsibilities]
George Moore - From Vale
Marianne Moore - [Review of The Wild Swans at Coole]
T. S. Eliot – The Poetry of W. B. Yeats
Maud Gonne – Yeats and Ireland
Recent Critical and Biographical Studies
Richard Ellmann – The Prelude
[Yeats and the Occult]
R. F. Foster – Two Years: Bedford Park 1887-1889
Declan Kiberd – Revolt into Style – Yeatsian Poetics
Daniel Albright – Yeats’s Waves
Jahan Ramazani – The Elegiac Love Poems: A Woman Dead and Gon(n)e
Harold Bloom – The Wind Among the Reeds
Helen Vendler – Technique in the Earlier Poems of Yeats
Michael J. Sidnell – Yeats’s “Written Speech”: Writing, Hearing, and Performance
Lucy McDiarmid – Yeats and the Lettered Page
R. F. Foster – The Taste of Salt 1902-1903
George Bornstein – The Aesthetics of Antinomy
Michael North – W. B. Yeats: Cultural Nationalism
Jahan Ramazani – “Easter, 1916” and the Balladic Elegies
Elizabeth Butler Cullingford – Shrill Voice, Accursed Opinions
John Kelly – “Friendship Is the Only House I Have”: Lady Gregory and W. B. Yeats
Thomas Parkinson – The Passionate Syntax
Ronald Schuchard – Hawk and Butterfly: The Double Vision of The Wilde Swans at Coole (1917,
1919)
Seamus Heaney –W. B. Yeats and Thoor Ballylee
Marjorie Howes – In the Bedroom of the Big House
Marjorie Perloff – Between Hatred and Desire: Sexuality and Subterfuge in “A Prayer for my Daughter”
Paul de Man – The Rhetorical Question: “Among School Children”
Anita Sokolsky – The Resistance to Sentimentality: Yeats, de Man, and the Aesthetic Education
Elizabeth Butler Cullingford – Desire and Hunger in “Among School Children”
James L. Pethica – Patronage and Creative Exchange: Yeats, Lady Gregory, and the Economy of
Indebtedness
Deirdre Toomey – Away
Marjorie Howes – The Rule of Kindred
Douglas Archibald – Politics and Public Life

Yeats: A Chronology
Bibliographical and Textual Appendix
Selected Bibliography
Index of Titles and First Lines of Poems