W. B. Yeats, ed.: The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936)•
Alice Boughton: W. B. Yeats (1903)W. B. Yeats: The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936)
[Finally Books - Hospice Bookshop, Birkenhead - 29/9/2022]:
Yeats, W. B., ed. The Oxford Book of Modern Verse: 1892-1935. 1936. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947.
He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.
Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.
But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
- W. H. Auden, In Memory of W. B. Yeats (1939)
There was a great deal of fuss over W. B. Yeats's final intentions for his poems in the late 1980s, when his work was just coming out of copyright. I remember at the time remarking to my friend Martin Frost that I had a good mind to write to some journal proposing a review of the competing editions of his Collected Poems in order to get copies of them all.
"Why would they waste them on you?" he riposted.
A trifle brusque, perhaps, but not in itself an unreasonable question. I was in the last year of my PhD, and no doubt had a high opinion of myself as a literary critic, but had zero reputation when it came to literary journals.
As it happened, I had more than enough to do with finishing my thesis - it's actually pretty typical to come up with such madcap schemes in the last days of such protracted projects, as I've learned since as the supervisor of quite a few - but I still suspect that I might have got some traction if I'd pursued the matter. I am, after all, something of a Yeats fanatic.
The Works of William Blake: Poetic, Symbolic and Critical. Edited with Lithographs of the Illustrated "Prophetic" Books" and a Memoir and Interpretation by Edwin John Ellis and William Butler Yeats. 3 vols. London, Bernard Quaritch, 1893.
You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:Yeats himself had a fair amount of experience as an editor. He started with the massive edition of Blake pictured above, and concluded with his controversial 1936 Oxford Book of Modern Verse: 1892-1935, which included hardly any WW1 poetry (in particular, nothing by Wilfred Owen), and a great deal of indifferent lyric verse by personal friends of his.
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
He commented further on the matter in a letter to a friend:
When I excluded Wilfred Owen, whom I consider unworthy of the poets' corner of a country newspaper, I did not know I was excluding a revered sandwich-board Man of the revolution & that some body has put his worst & most famous poem in a glass-case in the British Museum - however if I had known it I would have excluded him just the same. He is all blood, dirt & sucked sugar stick (look at the selection in Faber's Anthology - he calls poets 'bards,' a girl a 'maid,' & talks about 'Titanic wars'). There is every excuse for him but none for those who like him. ...Perhaps the author of "Easter 1916" and "Meditations in Time of Civil War" was a little reluctant to admit this rival war poet to the canon of English verse.
Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.
In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
My own copy of this early edition of Yeats's Poems is signed "A. A. Ross" - it belonged to my grandfather, Angus Alexander Ross, and was passed on to me by my Gaelic-speaking grandmother. It includes Yeats's early verse plays "The Countess Cathleen" and "The Land of Heart's Desire", the two poetry collections "The Rose" and "Crossways", and the verse epic "The Wanderings of Usheen" (so-spelt).
Since then, of course, I've supplemented this collection of his work to date with a whole slew of others.
W. B. Yeats. Early Poems and Stories. London: Macmillan, 1925.
Pride of place among them is held by this beautiful 1925 edition of his Early Poems and Stories, also originally owned by my grandparents. It includes, in rough chronological order:
- The Wanderings of Usheen (1889)
- Crossways (1889)
- The Rose (1893)
- The Celtic Twlight (1893)
- The Secret Rose (1897)
- Stories of Red Hanrahan (1905)
- Rosa Alchemica (1897)
W. B. Yeats. Collected Poems. 1933. Second edition. 1950. London: Macmillan Limited, 1977.
I think that I requested a copy of the book above for my birthday sometime in my mid-teens: perhaps even in 1977! I've read it more times than I can count, and have grown reconciled to the rather odd idea of putting all the longer poems at the back and all the collections of lyrics at the front.
Mixing them up would have helped greatly with the chronological sequencing of his work, but this arrangement was, after all, approved by Yeats himself - though there's been a lot of debate since about just how much interest he took in this particular stop-gap, popular edition, given his main focus was on the long-projected limited "edition de luxe" of his poems and prose as a whole which was supposed to be coming out - in slightly different forms - from Scribners in New York and Macmillan in London.
Alas, due in part to the war, and to Yeats's own untimely death in 1939, it was never to appear.
W. B. Yeats. The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats. Ed. Peter Allt & Russell K. Alspach. 1957. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1973.
Instead, a 2-volume, limited edition of The Poetry of W. B. Yeats - described in Macmillan's publicity materials, though not in the text itself, as the 'Definitive Edition' - was published in 1949. It sold out on publication day, but for a long time it was assumed to embody the author's final intentions for his poetry. Peter Allt and Russell Alspach therefore - on the advice of the poet's widow - chose it as the copytext for their immense, magisterial variorum edition of Yeats's poetry.
They included information on every appearance of every poem - including a large appendix of all the poems he'd published and then excluded from his final collections. It's therefore quite indispensible for any serious student of the subject. It does, however, restrict itself to published rather than manuscript sources, which were not then sufficiently accessible to be consulted.
The Poems of W. B. Yeats. Ed. William York Tindall. Illustrated by Robin Jacques. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Heritage Press, 1970.
This is a nicely illustrated edition of Yeats's "greatest hits." It represents a kind of steady state of Yeats editing, where the Variorum (and its copy-text, the 1949 Poems of W. B. Yeats) could be considered the last word on the matter.
W. B. Yeats. The Poems: A New Edition. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. W. B. Yeats: Collected Edition, 1. Ed. Richard J. Finneran & George Mills Harper. London: Macmillan Limited, 1983.
Until, that is, this particular bombshell appeared. Richard J. Finneran's The Poems: A New Edition was the first volume in a projected re-edited and re-imagined collected edition of Yeats's collected works. Finneran's starting point was a flat rejection of the authority of the 1949 Poems of W. B. Yeats as the final embodiment of the author's intentions for his text.
There were many reasons for this, as he explained in an accompanying book called Editing Yeats's Text. Principally it was because, in the absence of the poet, who'd only been able to read proofs of the earlier parts of the edition, too many major decisions had had to be made by Yeats's Macmillan editor Thomas Mark, along with George Yeats. The two of them had, perforce, been forced to take many liberties with Yeats's punctuation and final textual choices.
Finneran therefore argued, in copious detail, that this made Yeats's Collected Poems (1933) the superior text, given the fact that it had appeared during the poet's lifetime and had the benefit of his close and continuous scrutiny, unlike the continually put-off "Edition de Luxe".
Finneran accordingly took his own text from multiple sources: whichever could be claimed to be the last to be corrected by the author himself. His basic copytext, though, was the 1933 Collected Poems rather than the 1949 Poetry of W. B. Yeats. He also included a second section of published but subsequently excluded work, like the editors of the Variorum Edition. Where he differed from them was in considering manuscript as well as printed evidence when making his final decisions.
W. B. Yeats. Yeats’s Poems. Ed. A. Norman Jeffares. Appendix by Warwick Gould. London: Papermac, 1989.
You have to remember that the 1980s were the great age of revisionist editing. Stanley Wells & Gary Taylor's New Oxford edition of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (1986) included two different texts of "King Lear", a radically pruned selection of poems, and - in general - a complete break with the conventions of the quiet past. Hans Walter Gabler's Ulysses: A Corrected Text (1984) proposed an overhauled version of the novel which rejected the published 1922 text in favour of a composite of manuscript, proofs, and other textual evidence which enshrined the editor as (in certain cases) a better informed authority than the author himself!
Finneran's edition of Yeats's poems was very much in this tradition, and - like the two examples above - it attracted an immediate and, on occasion, virulent backlash.
This can be seen in its purest form in Warwick Gould's "The Definitive Edition: A History of the Final Arrangements of Yeats's Work," included as an appendix to A. Norman Jeffares' anti-revisionist edition of Yeats's Poems, designed mostly as a counterblast to Finneran's multiple heresies.
Where Finneran prefers the 1933 arrangement of lyric poems followed by longer narrative ones, Jeffares returns (for the most part) to the purely chronological 1949 one. Where Finneran includes subsequently rejected poems, Jeffares is careful to exclude them. Which is not to say that Jeffares' book is without its innovations. On the contrary, the distillation of his separately published Commentary on The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1968) into the notes to this edition make it a very valuable and readable book in its own right.
There is rage at its heart, though: most apparently in Gould's case, but implicit in Jeffares', too.
W. B. Yeats. The Poems. Ed. Daniel Albright. Everyman. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1990.
It's worth noting that all of the warring editions mentioned above were put out by Macmillan, Yeats's publishers in London and New York. That copyright ran out in 1989, however, and so Everyman's Library could enter the fray with their own edition, Daniel Albright's Yeats: The Poems.
For the most part Albright adopts a temporising strategy. Like Jeffares, he uses the chronological order of interspersed longer and shorter poems, as in the 1949 Poems. He does, however, accept Finneran's argument that the 1933 Collected Poems should be regarded as providing a superior text.
Like Jeffares, he excludes the poems not included in Yeats's final collection, quoting in support of this decision a quatrain from Yeats's mid-career Collected Works (1908):
Accursed who brings to light of dayEven in this category, however, he is less doctrinaire than Jeffares:
The writings I have cast away!
But blessed he that stirs them not
And lets the kind worm take the lot!
I have taken some liberties ... In order to illustrate Yeats's methods of revision, I have printed both an early and a late version of two poems, 'The Sorrow of Love' and 'The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner'. And I have put in the notes complete texts of of some rejected or uncollected poems - those that illuminate other poems ... and those unpublished to avoid embarrassment to the living. But Yeats was a good judge of the merits of his own work, and many of his juvenile works deserve oblivion.He concludes joshingly: "Those who wish to dredge Lethe may consult the Variorum Edition, or Finneran's."
By and large, Albright's edition of Yeats's Poems provides a sound, well-annotated text which provides all that any reasonable general reader could require. If it lacks the ideological fervour of Finneran's or Jeffares' (or the mind-numbing immensity of the Variorum Edition), that's hardly a criticism.
For nerds such as myself, though, it fails to provide a complete solution to that dilemma: which text of Yeats's Poems is best?
W. B. Yeats. The Poems: Second Edition. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. 1983. The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, 1. Ed. Richard J. Finneran & George Mills Harper. 14 vols. New York: Scribner, 1997.
Which brings us, by a commodious vicus of recirculation, to the revised and corrected version of Finneran's edition of Yeats's poems, published as The Poems Revised in 1989 - along with a revised version of his book on the subject, Editing Yeats's Poems: A Reconsideration (1989) - and subsequently included in the 14-volume edition of Yeat's Collected Works of which Finneran was one of the general editors.
Apart from the correction of a few errors, Finneran made virtually no concessions to any remaining defenders of the textual authority of the 1949 edition. His arguments in favour of the 1933 Collected Poems appear to him sound, and have since met with general agreement.
On the other hand, the chronological ordering adopted by Jeffares and Albright in their own editions is so obviously superior to the generic division between lyric and narrative poems adopted - largely for expediency's sake - in the Collected Poems, that it's hard to imagine the latter being perpetuated in any future texts.
Certainly Finneran's is the most inclusive text now available to readers of Yeats's poems - as well as, arguably, the most textually sound. For those reasons alone I wouldn't be without it. For everyday reading, though, I must confess to a sneaking taste for Jeffares' unfussy and very functional edition.
As the Master himself once put it:
‘A line will take us hours maybe;So, perhaps, after all, it isn't so ridiculous a thing to pay so much attention to the minutest details of the poems of so dedicated and conscientious a craftsman as this.
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Better go down upon your marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones
Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;
For to articulate sweet sounds together
Is to work harder than all these, and yet
Be thought an idler by the noisy set
Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen
The martyrs call the world.’- W. B. Yeats, "Adam's Curse"
Books I own are marked in bold:
-
Poetry:
- Crossways (1889)
- The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889)
- The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (1892)
- Poems (1895)
- Poems. 1895. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1920.
- The Wind Among the Reeds (1899)
- The Shadowy Waters (1900)
- In the Seven Woods (1903)
- Poems, 1899–1905 (1906)
- The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910)
- Poems: Second Series (1910)
- Poems Written in Discouragement (1913)
- Responsibilities, and Other Poems (1916)
- The Wild Swans at Coole, Other Verses and a Play in Verse (1917)
- The Wild Swans at Coole (1919)
- Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921)
- Later Poems (1922)
- Seven Poems and a Fragment (1922)
- The Cat and the Moon, and Certain Poems (1924)
- Early Poems and Stories (1925)
- Early Poems and Stories. London: Macmillan, 1925.
- October Blast (1927)
- The Tower (1928)
- A Packet for Ezra Pound (1929)
- The Winding Stair. Signed, limited edition (1929)
- Words for Music Perhaps, and Other Poems (1932)
- Collected Poems (1933)
- Collected Poems. 1933. Second edition. 1950. London: Macmillan Limited, 1967.
- The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933)
- The King of the Great Clock Tower (1934)
- A Full Moon in March (1935)
- New Poems (1938)
- Last Poems and Two Plays (1939)
- The Poetry of W. B. Yeats (1949)
- The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats (1957)
- The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats. Ed. Peter Allt & Russell K. Alspach. 1957. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1973.
- The Poems of W. B. Yeats (1970)
- The Poems of W. B. Yeats. Ed. William York Tindall. Illustrated by Robin Jacques. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Heritage Press, 1970.
- The Poems: A New Edition (1983)
- The Poems: A New Edition. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. W. B. Yeats: Collected Edition, 1. Ed. Richard J. Finneran & George Mills Harper. London: Macmillan Limited, 1983.
- The Poems: Second Edition. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. 1983. The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, 1. Ed. Richard J. Finneran & George Mills Harper. 14 vols. New York: Scribner, 1997.
- Yeats’s Poems (1989)
- Yeats’s Poems. Ed. A. Norman Jeffares. Appendix by Warwick Gould. London: Papermac, 1989.
- The Poems (1990)
- The Poems. Ed. Daniel Albright. Everyman. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1990.
- Selected Poems (1991)
- Selected Poems. Ed. Timothy Webb. 1991. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000.
- A Yeats Reader (1997)
- A Yeats Reader: A Portable Compendium of Poetry, Drama, and Prose. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. New York: Scribner, 1997.
- Yeats' Poetry, Drama and Prose (2000)
- Yeats' Poetry, Drama and Prose: Authoritative Texts / Contexts / Criticism. Ed. James Pethica. 1999. Norton Critical Editions. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2000.
- The Land of Heart's Desire (1894)
- Cathleen Ní Houlihan (1902)
- Where There is Nothing (1903)
- The Hour Glass (1903)
- The Hour-Glass; Cathleen ni Houlihan; The Pot of Broth (1904)
- The King's Threshold; and On Baile's Strand (1904)
- Deirdre (1907)
- Two Plays for Dancers (1919)
- Four Plays for Dancers (1921)
- The Player Queen (1922)
- Plays in Prose and Verse (1922)
- Plays and Controversies (1923)
- Collected Plays (1934)
- Collected Plays. 1934. Second edition. London: Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1952.
- Collected Plays. 1934. Second edition. 1952. Papermac. London: Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1982.
- Wheels and Butterflies (1934)
- The Words Upon the Window Pane: A Play in One Act, with Notes Upon the Play and Its Subject (1934)
- The Herne's Egg (1938)
- Selected Plays (1964)
- Selected Plays. Ed. A. Norman Jeffares. 1964. Pan Classics. London: Pan Books / Macmillan, 1974.
- The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W. B. Yeats (1966)
- The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W. B. Yeats. Ed. Russell K. Alspach, with Catherine C. Alspach. 1966. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1979.
- The Death of Cuchulain (1982)
- The Death of Cuchulain: Manuscript Materials Including the Author's Final Text. Ed. Phillip L. Marcus. The Cornell Yeats: Plays ed. David R. Clark. Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1982.
- The Plays (2001)
- The Plays. Ed. David R. Clark & Rosalind E. Clark. The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, 2. Ed. Richard J. Finneran & George Mills Harper. 14 vols. New York: Scribner, 2001.
- John Sherman and Dhoya (1891)
- John Sherman & Dhoya. 1891. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1969.
- Included in: Short Fiction. Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995.
- The Speckled Bird (1974)
- The Speckled Bird. 1896-1902, 1974. Ed. William H. O'Donnell. Yeats Studies Series. Ed. Robert O'Driscoll & Lorna Reynolds. Toronto: McLelland and Stewart Limited, 1976.
- Rosa Alchemica: The Tables of the Law; The Adoration of the Magi [Privately printed] (1897)
- The Secret Rose (1897)
- Included in: Mythologies. London: Macmillan & Co Ltd., 1959.
- The Secret Rose, Stories: A Variorum Edition. Ed. Phillip L. Marcus, Warwick Gould, & Michael J. Sidnell. Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press Ltd., 1981.
- Included in: Short Fiction. Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995.
- Rosa Alchemica (1904)
- Included in: Mythologies. London: Macmillan & Co Ltd., 1959.
- Included in: Short Fiction. Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995.
- Stories of Red Hanrahan (1905)
- Included in: Mythologies. London: Macmillan & Co Ltd., 1959.
- Included in: Short Fiction. Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995.
- Stories of Red Hanrahan and the Secret Rose (1927)
- Included in: Mythologies. London: Macmillan & Co Ltd., 1959.
- Mythologies (1959)
- Mythologies: The Celtic Twilight; The Secret Rose; Stories of Red Hanrahan; Rosa Alchemica: The Tables of the Law & The Adoration of the Magi; Per Amica Silentia Lunae. 1893, 1897, 1905, 1904, 1918. London: Macmillan & Co Ltd., 1959.
- Short Fiction (1995)
- Short Fiction. Ed. G. J. Watson. Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995.
- The Celtic Twilight (1893)
- Included in: Mythologies. London: Macmillan & Co Ltd., 1959.
- Ideas of Good and Evil (1903)
- Included in: Essays. London: Macmillan, 1924.
- Included in: Essays and Introductions. London: Macmillan & Co Ltd., 1961.
- Discoveries (1907)
- Synge and the Ireland of his Time (1911)
- The Cutting of an Agate (1912)
- Included in: Essays. London: Macmillan, 1924.
- Included in: Essays and Introductions. London: Macmillan & Co Ltd., 1961.
- Reveries Over Childhood and Youth (1916)
- Included in: Autobiographies. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1956.
- Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1918)
- Included in: Essays. London: Macmillan, 1924.
- Included in: Essays and Introductions. London: Macmillan & Co Ltd., 1961.
- Four Years (1921)
- The Trembling of the Veil (1922)
- Included in: Autobiographies. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1956.
- Essays (1924)
- Essays: Ideas of Good and Evil / The Cutting of an Agate / Per Amica Silentia Lunae. 1903, 1912, 1918. London: Macmillan, 1924.
- A Vision (1925)
- A Vision: The Original 1925 Edition. Ed. Catherine E. Paul & Margaret Mills Harper. The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, 13. Ed. George Bornstein, George Mills Harper, and Richard J. Finneran. 14 vols. Scribner. New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2008.
- Estrangement: Being Some Fifty Thoughts from a Diary Kept by William Butler Yeats in the Year Nineteen Hundred and Nine (1926)
- Included in: Autobiographies. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1956.
- Autobiographies of William Butler Yeats (1926)
- Included in: Autobiographies. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1956.
- The Death of Synge, and Other Passages from an Old Diary (1928)
- Included in: Autobiographies. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1956.
- Letters to the New Island (1934)
- Letters to the New Island. Ed. Horace Reynolds. 1934. London: Oxford University Press, 1970.
- Letters to the New Island: A New Edition. 1934. Ed. George Bornstein & Hugh Witemeyer. The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, 7. Ed. Richard J. Finneran & George Mills Harper. 14 vols. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1989.
- Dramatis Personae (1935)
- Autobiographies. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1956.
- A Vision (1937)
- A Vision: The Revised 1937 Edition. Ed. Margaret Mills Harper & Catherine E. Paul. The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, 14. Ed. George Bornstein. 14 vols. Scribner. New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2015.
- A Vision. 1925 & 1937. Papermac. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1981.
- A Vision and Related Writings. 1925 & 1937. Ed. A. Norman Jeffares. London: Arena, 1990.
- Essays 1931 to 1936 (1937)
- Included in: Essays and Introductions. London: Macmillan & Co Ltd., 1961.
- Autobiographies ['Reveries over Childhood and Youth' (1914); 'The Trembling of the Veil' (1922); 'Dramatis Personae' (1935); 'The Death of Synge' (1928)] (1938)
- Included in: Autobiographies. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1956.
- On the Boiler: Essays, Poems and a Play (1939)
- Included in: Explorations. London: Macmillan & Co Ltd., 1962.
- Autobiographies (1955)
- Autobiographies: Reveries over Childhood and Youth; The Trembling of the Veil; Dramatis Personae; Estrangement; The Death of Synge; The Bounty of Sweden. 1916, 1922, 1935, 1926, 1928, 1938, 1955. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1956.
- The Senate Speeches (1960)
- The Senate Speeches of W. B. Yeats. Ed. Donald R. Pearce. 1960. London: Faber, 1961.
- Essays and Introductions (1961)
- Essays and Introductions: Ideas of Good and Evil / The Cutting of an Agate / Later Essays and Introductions. 1903 & 1912. London: Macmillan & Co Ltd., 1961.
- Explorations (1962)
- Explorations: Explorations I / The Irish Dramatic Movement: 1901-1919 / Explorations II / Pages from a Diary Written in Nineteen Hundred and Thirty: 1944 / From Wheels and Butterflies: 1934 / From On the Boiler: 1939. Selected by Mrs. W. B. Yeats. London: Macmillan & Co Ltd., 1962.
- Selected Criticism and Prose (1964)
- Selected Criticism and Prose. Ed. A. Norman Jeffares. 1964. Pan Classics. London: Pan Books, 1980.
- Uncollected Prose. 2 vols (1970 & 1975)
- Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats. Volume 1: First Reviews and Articles, 1886-1896. Ed. John P. Frayne. 2 vols. London: Macmillan and Co Ltd., 1970.
- Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats. Volume 2: Reviews, Articles and Other Miscellaneous Prose, 1897-1939. Ed. John P. Frayne & Colton Johnson. 2 vols. London: Macmillan and Co Ltd., 1975.
- Memoirs (1972)
- Memoirs: Autobiography – First Draft / Journal. Ed. Denis Donoghue. London: Macmillan Limited, 1972.
- Writings on Irish Folklore, Legend and Myth (1993)
- Writings on Irish Folklore, Legend and Myth. Ed. Robert Welch. Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993.
- Sophocles' King Oedipus: A Version for the Modern Stage (1928)
- Included in: Collected Plays. 1934. Second edition. 1952. Papermac. London: Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1982.
- The Ten Principal Upanishads (1937)
- [with Shree Purohit Swāmi] The Ten Principal Upanishads. 1937. Faber Paper Covered Editions. London: Faber, 1970.
- Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888)
- Included in: Fairy & Folk Tales of Ireland: Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry; Irish Fairy Tales. 1888 & 1892. Foreword by Kathleen Raine. 1973. List of Sources by Mary Helen Thuente. 1977. London: Picador, 1979.
- Stories from Carleton (1889)
- Stories from Carleton. The Camelot Series, ed. Ernest Rhys. London: Walter Scott / Toronto: W. J. Gage & Co., n.d. [c.1889].
- Representative Irish Tales (1891)
- Irish Fairy Tales (1892)
- Included in: Fairy & Folk Tales of Ireland: Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry; Irish Fairy Tales. 1888 & 1892. Foreword by Kathleen Raine. 1973. List of Sources by Mary Helen Thuente. 1977. London: Picador, 1979.
- [with Edwin Ellis] The Works of William Blake: Poetic, Symbolic and Critical (1893)
- A Book of Irish Verse (1895)
- Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsany (1912)
- The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936)
- The Oxford Book of Modern Verse: 1892-1935. 1936. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947.
- [with Dorothy Wellesley] Broadsides: New Irish & English Songs (1937)
- "Song of the Fairies" & "Voices" (1885)
- "Mosada" (1886)
- "Irish Fairies" (1890)
- "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" (1890)
- "The Tables of the Law" (1896)
- "Easter 1916" (1916)
- "The Second Coming" (1920)
- "The Resurrection" (1927)
- Letters on Poetry to Dorothy Wellesley. London: Oxford University Press, 1940.
- W. B. Yeats and T. Sturge Moore: Their Correspondence, 1901-1937. Ed. Ursula Bridge. New York: Oxford University Press, 1953.
- The Letters of W. B. Yeats. Ed. Allan Wade. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954.
- Ah, Sweet Dancer: W. B. Yeats, Margot Ruddock: A Correspondence. Ed. Roger McHugh. Gill and Macmillan. London: Macmillan and Co Ltd., 1970.
- The Correspondence of Robert Bridges and W. B. Yeats. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1977.
- Letters to W. B. Yeats. Ed. Richard J. Finneran, George Mills Harper, & William M. Murphy, with the Assistance of Alan B. Himber. 2 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977.
- George Mills Harper. W. B. Yeats and W. T. Horton: The Record of an Occult Friendship. Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, Inc., 1980.
- Always Your Friend: The Gonne-Yeats Letters: 1893-1938. Ed. Anna MacBride White & A. Norman Jeffares. 1992. London: Pimlico, 1993.
- The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats. General Editor: John Kelly. Oxford English Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986-.
- 1865-1895. Ed. John Kelly & Eric Domville (1986)
- 1896-1900. Ed. Warwick Gould, John Kelly & Deirdre Toomey (1997)
- 1901-1904. Ed. John Kelly & Ronald Schuchard (1994)
- 1905-1907. Ed. John Kelly & Ronald Schuchard (2005)
- 1908-1910. Ed. John Kelly & Ronald Schuchard (2018)
- Ellmann, Richard. Yeats: The Man and the Masks. 1948. New Preface by the Author. Oxford University Press Paperback. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979.
- Ellmann, Richard. The Identity of Yeats. 1954. Faber Paper Covered Editions. London: Faber, 1964.
- Ellmann, Richard. Eminent Domain: Yeats among Wilde, Joyce, Pound, Eliot and Auden. 1967. London: Oxford University Press, 1970.
- Ellmann, Richard. a long the riverrun: Selected Essays. 1988. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989.
- Foster, R. F. W. B. Yeats: A Life. I: The Apprentice Mage, 1865-1914. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
- Foster, R. F. W. B. Yeats: A Life. II: The Arch-Poet, 1915-1939. 2003. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
- Hardwick, Joan. The Yeats Sisters: A Biography of Susan and Elizabeth Yeats. Pandora. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1996.
- Hone, Joseph. W. B. Yeats: 1865-1939. 1943. Pelican Biographies. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.
- Jeffares, A. Norman. A Commentary on The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. London: Macmillan & Co Ltd., 1968.
- Jeffares, A. Norman, & A. S. Knowland. A Commentary on The Collected Plays of W. B. Yeats. 1975. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1975.
- Kiely, Benedict. Yeats’ Ireland: An Illustrated Anthology. 1989. London: Aurum Press, 1990.
- Maddox, Brenda. George’s Ghosts: A New Life of W. B. Yeats. 1999. Picador. London: Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 2000.
- Mikhail, E. H., ed. W. B. Yeats: Interviews and Recollections. Foreword by A. Norman Jeffares. 2 vols. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1977.
- Miller, Liam. Yeats’s West. Dublin: The Irish Tourist Board, n.d. [c. 1987]
- Stallworthy, Jon. Between the Lines: Yeats’s Poetry in the Making. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963.
Plays:
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Periodical Publications:
Letters:
Secondary:
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- category - English Poetry (post-1900): Alphabetical
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