Yeats Annual No.8 has two distinct themes: Yeats's poetic technique and his aims for an Irish Theatre. Essays from Helen Vendler, Richard Taylor, Timothy Armstrong and Wayne Chapman place the poetry under close scrutiny and offer challenging new studies. Yeats himself writes the remaining essays, including the long-awaited first publication of his Wildean dialogue and an uncollected address on the Irish National Theatre delivered in 1934. Richard Londraville edits four of Yeats's lectures given in England and America in 1902-4.

Yeats Annual is the leading international research-level journal devoted to the greatest twentieth-century poet in the English language. In this number there are new essays on Yeats's theatre by leading scholars such as Richard Allen Cave, Gregory N. Eaves and Masaru Sekine, while scholars from nine countries including Peter L. Caracciolo and Paul Edwards, Maneck H. Daruwala, William F. Halloran, Elisabeth Heine and Colleen MacKenna address such matters as 'Yeats and Maud Gonne: Marriage and the Astrological Record, 1908-9', Yeats's relations with Fiona Macleod and with Wyndham Lewis, the Ghost of Wordsworth, Philip Larkin and Seamus Heaney. There are new essays on A Vision , shorter bibliographical notes and reviews of ten new studies.

Yeats Annual No. 11 has four broad themes: W.B. Yeats's written and oral poetic technique; his philosophical interests in Eastern thought and A Vision; his manuscripts: and Jack B. Yeats's work, including his illustrations for his brother's writing. The contributions include: Michael Sidnell on Yeats's 'Written Speech'; Helen Vendler on Yeats and Ottava Rima; Steve Ellis on Chaucer, Yeats and the Living Voice; P.S. Sri on Yeats and Mohini Chatterjee; Matthew Gibson and Colin McDowell on A Vision and the automatic script; Wayne Chapman on the 'Countess Cathleen Row' of 1899 and revisions to the play; Warwick Gould and Deirdre Toomey on The Flame of the Spirit; Hilary Pyle on Jack B. Yeats's Illustrations for his Brother; John Purser's edited transcript of Jack Yeats and Thomas MacGreevy in conversation. There are shorter notes by Morton D. Paley, A.Norman Jeffares, Lis Pihl and others. Fourteen new books are reviewed and the nine plates include hitherto unpublished images.

This book is a resource to enable scholars and students in Yeats studies to explore the materials in his library, which, together with his unpublished papers and manuscripts, forms part of the writer’s archive in the National Library. Generally, this first volume describes the evidence that he and his wife, George, left in books by other authors, including extensive indications of close reading and thinking on a surprising range of subjects. This book could not have been written without the generous participation of the Yeats family over many years. Their legacy, now entrusted to the National Library, is robust and endless in potential. This book is about individual cases but also the building of an oeuvre. In short, this book enriches our understanding of Yeats’s accomplishment as a writer in over fifty years of creative effort and nearly seventy-four years of abundant life.

The essays in Yeats Annual No 7 are dedicated to the memory of Richard Ellmann, one of the great pioneer critics of W.B.Yeats. They have been contributed by distinguished colleagues and friends of Richard Ellmann, chosen on his advice. The volume also contains much new material by Yeats himself - a new and virtually complete early draft of his novel The Speckled Bird, here entitled 'The Lilies of the Lord' and two new poems from The Flame of the Spirit manuscript book, given to Maud Gonne in 1981.