This volume presents previously unpublished manuscript drafts of two key early dramatic poems by W. B. Yeats, comprising over half the extant manuscripts of his poetry written through 1895. From reviews of The Cornell Yeats series: "For students of Yeats the whole series is bound to become an essential reference source and a stimulus to important critical re-readings of Yeats's major works. In a wider context, the series will also provide an extraordinary and perhaps unique insight into the creative process of a great artists." Irish Literary Supplement "I consider the Cornell Yeats one of the most important scholarly projects of our time." A. Walton Litz, Princeton University, coeditor of The Collected Poems of William Carols Williams and Personae: The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound "The most ambitious of the many important projects in current studies of Yeats and perhaps of modern poetry generally. . . . The list of both general and series editors, as well as prospective preparers of individual volumes, reads like a Who's Who of Yeats textual studies in North America. Further, the project carries the blessing of Yeats's heirs and bespeaks an ongoing commitment from a major university press. . . . The series will inevitably engender critical studies based on a more solid footing than those of any other modern poet. . . . Its volumes will be consulted long after gyres of currently fashionable theory have run on." Yeats Annual (1983)"

Now it is possible for the first time to trace in a systematic way the language patterns of one of the greatest poets who have written in English, W. B. Yeats. Like A Concordance to the Poems of Matthew Arnold, the first of the Cornell Concordances that are under the general editorship of Professor Parrish, this volume was produced on an IBM 704 electronic data-processing machine. Computer technique has so advanced that the Yeats concordance includes punctuation and gives cross references for the second parts of hyphenated words. The frequency of every word in Yeats's poems is given, and an appendix lists all indexed words in order of frequency. The body of this book consists of an index of all significant words in Yeats, each word listed in the line or lines in which it occurs. The concordance is based on the variorum text of Yeats, edited by Alspach and Allt, and includes all variants that occur in printed versions of Yeats's poems.

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.

When H. P. Blavatsky, the controversial head of the turn of the century movement Theosophy, defined "a true Theosophist" in her book The Key to Theosophy, she could have just as easily have been describing W. B. Yeats. Blavatsky writes, "A true Theosophist must put in practice the loftiest moral ideal, must strive to realize his unity with the whole of humanity, and work ceaselessly for others." Although Yeats joined Blavatsky's group in 1887, and subsequently left to help form The Golden Dawn in 1890, Yeats's career as poet and politician were very much in line with the methods set forth by Blavatsky's doctrine. My project explores how Yeats employs this pop-culture occultism in the creation of his own national literary aesthetic. This project not only examines the influence theosophy has on the literary work Yeats produced in the late 1880's and 1890's, but also Yeats's work as literary critic and anthology editor during that time. While Yeats uses theosophy's metaphysical world view to provide an underlying structure for some of his earliest poetry and drama, he uses theosophy's methods of investigation and argument to discover a metaphysical literary tradition which incorporates all of his own literary heroes into an Irish cultural tradition. Theosophy provides a methodology for Yeats to argue that both Shelley and Blake (for example) are part of a tradition that includes himself. Basing his argument in theosophy, Yeats can argue that the Irish people are a distinct race with a culture more "sincere" and "natural" than that of England.

Modernists and the Theatre is the first study to examine how theories of modernism intersect with those of the theatre within the works, philosophies and literary lives of six key modernist writers. Drawing on a wealth of unfamiliar archive material and fresh readings of neglected documents, James Moran reveals how these literary figures interacted with the theatre through playwriting, by engaging in philosophical debates and participating in theatrical performances. Chapters assess W.B. Yeats's very earliest playwriting, Ezra Pound's onstage acting, the interconnections between James Joyce's and D.H. Lawrence's sense of drama, Eliot's thinking about theatre in Dublin, and the feminist politics of Virginia Woolf's small-scale theatrical experiments. While these writers valued coterie production and often made hostile comments about drama, this volume highlights the paradoxical fact that, despite their harsh words, the theatrically 'large-scale' also attracted each of these writers. The theatre event of 'restricted production' offered modernists a satisfying mode of sharing their work amongst the like-minded, and the book discloses a set of unfamiliar events of this sort that allowed these writers to act as agents of legitimation in granting cultural value. The book explores their engagements with popular drama, as well as the long-forgotten acting performances in which each of these writers personally participated. Moran uncovers how the playhouse became a key geographical space where the high-modernists could explore a tension that fascinated them, and which motivated much of their wider thinking and literary work.

The forty-two chapters in this book consider Yeats's early toil, his practical and esoteric concerns as his career developed, his friends and enemies, and how he was and is understood. This Handbook brings together critics and writers who have considered what Yeats wrote and how he wrote, moving between texts and their contexts in ways that will lead the reader through Yeats's multiple selves as poet, playwright, public figure, and mystic. It assembles a variety of views and adds to a sense of dialogue, the antinomian or deliberately-divided way of thinking that Yeats relished and encouraged. This volume puts that sense of a living dialogue in tune both with the history of criticism on Yeats and also with contemporary critical and ethical debates, not shirking the complexities of Yeats's more uncomfortable political positions or personal life. It provides one basis from which future Yeats scholarship can continue to participate in the fascination of all the contributors here in the satisfying difficulty of this great writer.