Acquisitions (109): Patrick Pearse

Patrick Pearse: Songs of the Irish Rebels (1918)

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Pádraig Mac Piarais (1879-1916)

Patrick Pearse: Songs of the Irish Rebels (1918)
[Finally Books - Hospice Bookshop, Birkenhead - 23/4/24]:

Padraic H. Pearse. Collected Works: Songs of the Irish Rebels and Specimens from an Irish Anthology. Dublin & London: Maunsel and Co., Limited, 1918.

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Easter Proclamation (1916)

Easter 1916

I wrote a blogpost a few years ago comparing Yeats's immortal "Easter 1916" with some of Seamus Heaney's poems about the Troubles in Northern Ireland:

History says, don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

- from The Cure at Troy (1990)

1916: The Irish Rebellion (2016)

1916: The Irish Rebellion: 3-part miniseries, created & writ. Bríona Nic Dhiarmada, dir. Pat Collins & Ruan Magan, narrated by Liam Neeson (Ireland, 2016).

Since then I've collected a lot more material on the subject, as well as watching and rewatching the very poignant centenary documentary pictured above. So much courage! so much futility! Talk about "a terrible beauty is born" ...

Every Celtic bone in my body was aching in sympathy as the perfidious English carried poor wounded James Connolly out into the execution yard on a stretcher, tied him to a chair, and shot him, just like all fourteen of the other martyrs (Roger Casement was hanged in London). It brings a tear to my eye even now.

Interestingly enough, though, the last of their three hour-long episodes is titled "When Myth and History Rhyme," presumably as an allusion to Heaney's free adaptation of Sophocles, quoted above.

The Easter Rising certainly is one of the most mythologised events of modern times: perhaps because the Irish have more good poets per square mile than virtually any other country can boast, but also because it remains something of an enigma, even after all this time.

Colin Teevan: Rebellion (2 series: 2016 & 2019)

Colin Teevan's recent TV series - another centennial effort - gives a somewhat different slant on 1916. His version of Patrick Pearse (for instance) is a martyr-in-training, cleverly manipulating the English to shoot him for "encouraging the enemy in time of war" instead of convicting him of the lesser offence of "armed insurrection."

The rest of the cast are haplessly swept up in the winds of war and nationalism. All end up more-or-less disillusioned by the end of the drama. It's certainly a coherent approach, but (dare I say it?) Teevan also succeeded in doing something nobody's really managed before, which was to make the Easter Rising seem quite boring.

The central motif of the "three little maids from school" - one a qualified doctor trying to avoid the loveless marriage her wealthy family is foisting on her; another the mistress of a Dublin Castle official, who does a bit of spying on the side, but is really more interested in advancement in the civil service; only the last a genuine fire-breathing fanatic, completely committed to the cause, who only needs to clap on a cloth cap to pass for a man and start shooting traitors - seems more redolent of the world of Downton Abbey than that of Cathleen ni Houlihan.

Did that play of mine send out
Certain men the English shot?

Yeats asked himself in "The Man and the Echo" (1938). I think it's safe to say that Colin Teevan's efforts seem most unlikely to have a similar effect. But then, maybe that's a good thing - maybe bored is better than dead.

Sean O'Casey: The Plough and the Stars (1926)

In any case, there's nothing particularly new in this deliberate undercutting of the myths of 1916. Teevan's TV series certainly recalls (possibly even references) Sean O'Casey's classic play The Plough and the Stars, booed at its first performance for its juxtaposition of what Yeats referred to as "the normal grossness of life" - a public house with a prostitute waiting for clients - with the inflated aspirations of the new republic, embodied in its battle standards: the tricolour flag of the Irish Volunteers and the plough-and-stars flag of the Irish Citizen Army.

On that occasion, too, Yeats stood up to harangue the Abbey Theatre rioters:

I thought you had tired of this ... But you have disgraced yourselves again. Is this going to be a recurring celebration of Irish genius? Synge first and then O'Casey.

- Wikipedia: The Plough and the Stars

W. B. Yeats: The Death of Cuchulain (1938-39)

Yeats himself, in his final play "The Death of Cuchulain", included a final chorus equating the death of the mythic Irish hero with those of the martyrs of 1916:

Are those things that men adore and loathe
Their sole reality?
What stood in the Post Office
With Pearse and Connolly?
What comes out of the mountain
Where men first shed their blood?
Who thought Cuchulain till it seemed
He stood where they had stood?

No body like his body
Has modern woman borne,
But an old man looking back in life
Imagines it in scorn.
A statue's there to mark the place,
By Oliver Sheppard done.
So ends the tale that the harlot
Sang to the beggar-man.

Oliver Sheppard: The Dying Cúchulain (1911)

Yeats refers again to Sheppard's Michelangelo-esque bronze in another late poem, “The Statues” (1938):

When Pearse summoned Cuchulain to his side
What stalked through the post Office? What intellect,
What calculation, number, measurement, replied?
We Irish, born into that ancient sect
But thrown upon this filthy modern tide
And by its formless spawning fury wrecked,
Climb to our proper dark, that we may trace
The lineaments of a plummet-measured face.

For myself, I'm still in two minds about it all. Before settling for these bathetic undercuttings as the last word on the Easter Rising, though, I'd urge you to click on the youtube link below, under the image from Ken Loach's wonderful BBC drama Days of Hope (1975), and see if you can resist the beauty of Tríona Ní Dhomhnaill's rendition of "The Bold Fenian Men."

Loach may have borrowed the idea for this scene from the ending of Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory (1957), but I can't help feeling that Loach's version is even more powerful and poignant.

John Ford, dir.: The Plough and the Stars (1936)

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Tríona Ní Dhomhnaill: "The Bold Fenian Men" (traditional)
Ken Loach: Days of Hope (BBC, 1975)

The Bold Fenian Men
(1916)

1. Roger Casement
2. Thomas MacDonagh
3. Sean O'Casey
4. Patrick Pearse
5. James Stephens
6. W. B. Yeats
7. Anthologies & Secondary Literature

Books I own are marked in bold:

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Sarah Purser: Roger Casement (1914)

Roger David Casement
[Ruairí Mac Easmainn / Sir Roger Casement]

(1864-1916)

There's small chance that the execution of Sir Roger Casement will ever cease to be a subject of controversy.
On the one hand, he was a renowned humanitarian, famous for exposing the genocidal crimes of the Belgian King Leopold's colonial regime in the Congo, and then doing much the same thing for the monstrous abuses of the Rubber Barons on the Amazon. He was knighted for these brave exploits.
On the other hand, he was a rabid Irish patriot, caught trying to smuggle guns into Ireland after landing there from a German submarine just before the Easter rising.
Lest these two truths cancel each other out, however, the Crown Prosecutors at his trial deliberately leaked passages from his private diaries which implied that he was an active homosexual. In his novel about Casement, The Dream of the Celt (2010), Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa tries to argue that these passages were simply sex fantasies, rather than the records of actual pick-ups. Most commentators see this as a cop-out, however.
Casement is thus a double martyr: ostensibly convicted for treason, but actually condemned for being a homosexual. It's hard, looking through modern eyes, to see him as anything but a hero.

Writings:


1. Sir Roger Casement's Heart of Darkness: The 1911 Documents Ed. Angus Mitchell (1999)
2. Slavery in Peru: Message from the President of the United States Transmitting Report of the Secretary of State, with Accompanying Papers, Concerning the Alleged Existence of Slavery in Peru (1913)
3. The Crime against Ireland, and How the War May Right it (1914)
4. Ireland, Germany and Freedom of the Seas: A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 (2005)
5. The Crime against Europe. The Causes of the War and the Foundations of Peace (1915)
6. Gesammelte Schriften. Irland, Deutschland und die Freiheit der Meere und andere Aufsätze (1916-17)
7. Some Poems (1918)

Diaries:


8. Singleton-Gates, Peter & Maurice Girodias. The Black Diaries: An Account of Roger Casement's Life and Times wth a Collection of His Diaries and Public Writings. Paris: The Olympia Press, 1959.
9. The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement. Ed. Angus Mitchell. Dublin: The Lilliput Press, Ltd. / London: Anaconda Editions, 1997.
10. Roger Casement's Diaries: 1910. The Black and the White. Ed. Roger Sawyer. London: Pimlico, 1997.
11. One Bold Deed of Open Treason: The Berlin Diary of Roger Casement. 1914-16. Ed. Angus Mitchell. Dublin: Irish Academic Press / Merrion Press, 2016.

Secondary:


12. Hyde, H. Montgomery. Famous Trials, Ninth Series: Roger Casement. 1960. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964.
13. MacColl, René. Roger Casement. 1956. A Four Square Biography. London: Landsborough Publications Limited, 1960.
14. Vargas Llosa, Mario. The Dream of the Celt. ['El sueño del celta', 2010]. Trans. Edith Grossman. London: Faber, 2012.

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Thomas MacDonagh (1916)

Thomas MacDonagh
[Tomás Mac Donnchadha]

(1878-1916)

This man had kept a school
And rode our wingèd horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.

The first of the two men listed in Yeats's "Easter 1916" is Patrick Pearse, who ran the school at St. Enda where Gaelic language and culture were taught. Our "wingèd horse" is presumably a reference to Pegasus, as Pearse was himself a poet and writer of short stories in both English and Irish.
The second is Thomas MacDonagh, whose plays had been put on in Yeats' and Lady Gregory's Abbey Theatre, and elsewhere, and whose lyric poetry was widely read - more after the rebellion than before it, admittedly.
The reasons for executing him seem more than usually spurious in this case, as his role in the rising was not particularly central. In retrospect, they should have shot Michael Collins or Éamon de Valera instead. No doubt they would have done, if it hadn't been for the fact that the latter was an American citizen and the former not yet as widely known - and feared - as he soon would be.

Poetry:


1. Through the Ivory Gate (1902)
2. April and May, with Other Verse (1903)
3. The Golden Joy (1906)
4. Songs of Myself (1910)
5. Lyrical Poems (1913)
6. Poems (1917)
   • The Poetical Works of Thomas MacDonagh. Introduction by James Stephens. London: T. Fisher Unwin Ltd., 1917.

Plays:


7. When the Dawn is Come (1908)
8. Metempsychosis (1912)
9. Pagans (1915)

Prose:


10. Thomas Campion and the Art of English Poetry (1913)
11. Literature in Ireland: Studies Irish and Anglo-Irish (1916)

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Sarah Purser: Seán O'Casey (c.1910)

Seán O'Casey
[John Casey / Seán Ó Cathasaigh]

(1880-1964)

"At the onset, O’Casey was a fanatical Irish republican nationalist. Born into an educated, but poverty-stricken family, he had only three years of school education, and became an undernourished unskilled labourer. At the time, the infant mortality rate in Dublin was higher than in Moscow or Calcutta. Despite a serious eye ailment, he educated himself, becoming an avid reader of literature. At an early age, he became an activist in the Gaelic League, the Irish Republican Brotherhood and other nationalist groupings. But because of his situation as a worker, it was almost inevitable that his artistic development would largely depend on the evolution of the socialist movement."

- Dombrovski: "Sean O'Casey and the 1916 Easter Rising." International Communist Current (2006)

O'Casey therefore saw the nationalist struggle begun in 1916 as a betrayal of the socialist ideals of the Irish Citizen Army. The class struggle between capitalists and workers remained, in his view, unaffected by the subsequent Treaty and Civil War.
Perhaps, then, there's something to be said for Dombrovski's view that O'Casey's "later artistic decline was linked to the perversion of [proletarian] principles with the defeat of the world revolution in the 1920s (O’Casey became an unapologetic Stalinist)." His 1926 play The Plough and the Stars - subsequently turned into a somewhat saccharine Hollywood movie - remains one of the most powerful works inspired by 1916, however.

1. [as Seán Ó Cathasaigh] Lament for Thomas Ashe (1917)
2. [as Seán Ó Cathasaigh] The Story of Thomas Ashe (1917)
3. [as Seán Ó Cathasaigh] Songs of the Wren (1918)
4. [as Seán Ó Cathasaigh] More Wren Songs (1918)
5. The Harvest Festival (1918)
6. [as Seán Ó Cathasaigh] The Story of the Irish Citizen Army (1919)
7. The Shadow of a Gunman (1923)
   • Included in: Three Plays: Juno and the Paycock / The Shadow of a Gunman / The Plough and the Stars. 1925 & 1926. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1962.
8. Kathleen Listens In (1923)
9. Juno and the Paycock (1924)
   • Included in: Three Plays: Juno and the Paycock / The Shadow of a Gunman / The Plough and the Stars. 1925 & 1926. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1962.
10. Nannie's Night Out (1924)
11. The Plough and the Stars (1926)
    • Included in: Three Plays: Juno and the Paycock / The Shadow of a Gunman / The Plough and the Stars. 1925 & 1926. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1962.
12. The Silver Tassie (1927)
    • Included in: Three More Plays: The Silver Tassie / Purple Dust / Red Roses for Me. 1928, 1940 & 1942. Introduction by J. C. Trewin. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd. / New York: St. Martin’s Press Inc., 1965.
13. Within the Gates (1934)
14. The End of the Beginning (1937)
    • Included in: Five One-Act Plays: The End of the Beginning / A Pound on Demand / Hall of Healing / Bedtime Story / Time To Go. St. Martin’s Library. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1958.
15. A Pound on Demand (1939)
    • Included in: Five One-Act Plays: The End of the Beginning / A Pound on Demand / Hall of Healing / Bedtime Story / Time To Go. St. Martin’s Library. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1958.
16. I Knock at the Door (1939)
    • Included in: Autobiographies, Volume I: I Knock at the Door / Pictures in the Hallway / Drums Under the Windows. 1939, 1942, 1945. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1963.
17. Purple Dust (1940)
    • Included in: Three More Plays: The Silver Tassie / Purple Dust / Red Roses for Me. 1928, 1940 & 1942. Introduction by J. C. Trewin. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd. / New York: St. Martin’s Press Inc., 1965.
18. The Star Turns Red (1940)
19. Pictures in the Hallway (1942)
    • Included in: Autobiographies, Volume I: I Knock at the Door / Pictures in the Hallway / Drums Under the Windows. 1939, 1942, 1945. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1963.
20. Red Roses for Me (1942)
    • Included in: Three More Plays: The Silver Tassie / Purple Dust / Red Roses for Me. 1928, 1940 & 1942. Introduction by J. C. Trewin. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd. / New York: St. Martin’s Press Inc., 1965.
21. Drums Under the Window (1945)
    • Included in: Autobiographies, Volume I: I Knock at the Door / Pictures in the Hallway / Drums Under the Windows. 1939, 1942, 1945. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1963.
22. Oak Leaves and Lavender (1946)
23. Cock-a-Doodle Dandy (1949)
24. Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well (1949)
    • Autobiography, Book 4: Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well. 1949. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1972.
25. Hall of Healing (1951)
    • Included in: Five One-Act Plays: The End of the Beginning / A Pound on Demand / Hall of Healing / Bedtime Story / Time To Go. St. Martin’s Library. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1958.
26. Bedtime Story (1951)
    • Included in: Five One-Act Plays: The End of the Beginning / A Pound on Demand / Hall of Healing / Bedtime Story / Time To Go. St. Martin’s Library. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1958.
27. Time to Go (1951)
    • Included in: Five One-Act Plays: The End of the Beginning / A Pound on Demand / Hall of Healing / Bedtime Story / Time To Go. St. Martin’s Library. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1958.
28. Rose and Crown (1952)
    • Autobiography, Book 5: Rose and Crown (1926-1934). 1952. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1973.
29. The Wild Goose (1952)
30. Sunset and Evening Star (1954)
    • Autobiography, Book 6: Sunset and Evening Star (1934-1953). 1954. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1973.
31. The Bishop's Bonfire: A Sad Play within the Tune of a Polka (1955)
32. Mirror in My House: Autobiographies. 2 vols (1956)
    • Autobiographies, Volume I: I Knock at the Door / Pictures in the Hallway / Drums Under the Windows. 1939, 1942, 1945. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1963.
33. The Drums of Father Ned (1957)
34. Behind the Green Curtains (1961)
35. Figuro in the Night (1961)
36. The Moon Shines on Kylenamoe (1961)
37. Niall: A Lament (1991)

Secondary:


38. O’Casey, Eileen. Sean. Ed. J. C. Trewin. 1971. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1973.

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Patrick Pearse (c.1915)

Patrick Henry Pearse
[Pádraig Anraí Mac Piarais / An Piarsach]

(1879-1916)

Pearse is in many ways the most enigmatic of the Easter martyrs. He can be read as a political naïf, so obsessed with the ancient glories of the Gaelic past that he forgot the realities of modern Ireland. Or, alternatively, he can be seen as a clever manipulator of public opinion, deliberately mounting a hopeless rebellion in order to provoke the English to retaliate brutally. His collected works do little to resolve the question. In the end, it's hard to see that it makes much difference. Whether he was sincerely misguided or cunningly far-sighted, his complete failure as a military leader paved the way for the total success of his overall strategy.

Some died by the glenside
some died mid the stranger
And wise men have told us
their cause was a failure
But they loved dear old Ireland
and never feared danger
Glory O, Glory O
to the bold Fenian men

He gave his life for his beliefs, in any case.

1. The Collected Works of Padraic H. Pearse. Ed. Desmond Ryan. 6 vols (1917-1922)
   1. Plays, Poems and Stories
      • Plays, Stories, Poems. 1917. Dublin & London: Maunsel and Co., Limited, 1919.
   2. St. Enda and Its Founders
   3. Songs of the Irish Rebels
      • Songs of the Irish Rebels and Specimens from an Irish Anthology. Dublin & London: Maunsel and Co., Limited, 1918.
   4. Scribhini [Gaelic writings]
   5. Political Writings and Speeches
   6. The Life of Patrick H. Pearse. Adapted from the French of Louis N. Le Roux and Revised by the Author. Translated into English by Desmond Ryan.

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James Stephens (1935)

James Stephens

(1882-1950)

[Bibliography]

"James Stephens (1880–1950) made his name with The Crock of Gold (1912), a story for children of all ages, creating ‘a world of rich fantasy’. He went to Paris in 1912, and in 1915 became Registrar of the National Gallery of Ireland. During Easter week 1916, Stephens witnessed the fighting around St Stephen’s Green, and soon after published an account of his observations: The Insurrection in Dublin."

- Dr Brendan Rooney: "James Stephens, the National Gallery of Ireland,
and the 1916 Rising." National Gallery of Ireland (2016)

As well as this short account of Easter week, Stephen also wrote an introduction for Thomas MacDonagh's Poetical Works (1917), and published his own book of translations and versions of traditional Irish poems - Reincarnations - in 1918. This was one of various 1916-related books I found in the Hospice shop the other day, along with works by Pearse and W. B. Yeats.

Poetry:


1. Reincarnations. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1918.
2. Collected Poems. 1926. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1931.

Prose:


3. The Insurrection in Dublin (1916)
4. James Stephens: A Selection. Ed. Lloyd Frankenberg. Preface by Padraic Colum. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1962.

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W. B. Yeats (c.1920s)

William Butler Yeats

(1865-1939)

[Bibliography]

"W. B. Yeats's iconic poem 'Easter 1916' will feature widely during this centenary year of the Easter Rising.
It is a many-layered work, but is essentially a love poem to Maud Gonne, whom the poet still hoped to capture. Maud rejected the poem in a famous letter to Yeats, writing, 'No, I don't like your poem, it isn't worthy of you and above all it isn't worthy of your subject.'
She objects to the line 'Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart' in reference to the Rising, but also to herself. Scholars have concentrated on this metaphor, but omit the other plainly stated reason she rejected the poem further along in her letter. Maud had sought a rapprochement with her husband John MacBride in 1910 but was rebuffed. After his execution, there was no obstacle, though Yeats's unwelcome poem stirs the old feud.
She tells him, and posterity: 'As for my husband he has entered Eternity by the great door of sacrifice which Christ opened & has therefore atoned for all so that in praying for him I can also ask for his prayers & "a terrible beauty is born".' Maud herself may well have been atoning for all to her late husband, John MacBride, in this remarkable sentence."

- Anthony J. Jordan, "Letter to the Editor." Irish Independent (8/1/2016)

Yeats was in London at the time of the rising, and was reported to have said that he was “overwhelmed by the news … [and] had no idea that a public event could move him so deeply.”
Having initially stated in "On being asked for a war poem": ‘“I think it better that in times like these a poet keep his mouth shut…” (quoted in K. Alldritt, W. B. Yeats: The Man and the Milieu, 1997), he had subsequently experienced the bombing of London by Zeppelins, and then been even more shocked by the 1915 sinking of the Lusitania, on which he had once travelled, by German submarines.
The treatment of the Easter 1916 prisoners had the effect of galvanising him into making a stand. This may well have been at least partly motivated by the desire to impress his old flame Maud Gonne, but the results certainly went far beyond that, witness his subsequent poem "Sixteen Dead Men":

O but we talked at large before
The sixteen men were shot,
But who can talk of give and take,
What should be and what not
While those dead men are loitering there
To stir the boiling pot?

You say that we should still the land
Till Germany’s overcome;
But who is there to argue that
Now Pearse is deaf and dumb?
And is their logic to outweigh
MacDonagh’s bony thumb?

Poetry:


1. Collected Poems. 1933. Second edition. 1950. London: Macmillan Limited, 1967.

Plays:


2. Collected Plays. 1934. Second edition. London: Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1952.
3. 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.

Prose:


4. 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.
5. Memoirs: Autobiography – First Draft / Journal. Ed. Denis Donoghue. London: Macmillan Limited, 1972.
6. 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.

Letters:


7. White, Anna MacBride, & A. Norman Jeffares, ed. Always Your Friend: The Gonne-Yeats Letters: 1893-1938. 1992. London: Pimlico, 1993.

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Max Caulfield: The Easter Rebellion (1963)

Anthologies & Secondary Literature

This is a very summary list of the works which could be cited on this subject. Between them, Max Caulfield's classic history The Easter Rebellion and Robert Kee's The Green Flag give a pretty good overview of the events themselves. Declan Kibber's book gives some useful insights into the ways it's been incorporated into the modern vision of Ireland.

1. Bell, J. Bowyer. The Secret Army: A History of the IRA, 1915-1970. 1970. London: Sphere Books Ltd., 1972.
2. Caulfield, Max. The Easter Rebellion. 1963. A Four Square Book. London: The New English Library Limited, 1965.
3. Kee, Robert. The Green Flag. 1972. 3 vols. London: Quartet Books, 1976.
   1. The Most Distressful Country
   2. The Bold Fenian Men
   3. Ourselves Alone
4. Kennelly, Brendan, ed. The Penguin Book of Irish Verse. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970.
5. Kiberd, Declan. Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation. 1995. Vintage. London: Random House, 1996.
6. McCourt, Malachy, ed. Voices of Ireland: Classic Writings of a Rich and Rare Land. Philadelphia: Running Press, 2002.

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• category - Irish Literature: Authors

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Acquisitions (85): W. B. Yeats

W. B. Yeats, ed.: The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936)

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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.

W. B. Yeats: Poems (1920)

Yeats's Editors

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)

W. H. Auden (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.

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Ellis & Yeats: The Works of William Blake (1893)

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:
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.

In Memory of W. B. Yeats

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.

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.

•

W. B. Yeats: Poems (1920)

W. B. Yeats. Poems. 1895. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1920.

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.

In Memory of W. B. Yeats

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 (1925)

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:

1. The Wanderings of Usheen (1889)
2. Crossways (1889)
3. The Rose (1893)
4. The Celtic Twlight (1893)
5. The Secret Rose (1897)
6. Stories of Red Hanrahan (1905)
7. Rosa Alchemica (1897)

W. B. Yeats: Collected Poems (1977)

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 (1957)

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.

William York Tindall, ed.: 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.

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 (1983)

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.

A. Norman Jeffares, ed.: Yeats's Poems

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 (1990)

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 day
The writings I have cast away!
But blessed he that stirs them not
And lets the kind worm take the lot!

Even in this category, however, he is less doctrinaire than Jeffares:

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 (2020)

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;
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"

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.

•

Yeats's Headstone (1939)

•

John Butler Yeats: William Butler Years (1900)

William Butler Yeats
(1865-1939)

Books I own are marked in bold:

Poetry:


1. Crossways (1889)
2. The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889)
3. The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (1892)
4. Poems (1895)
   • Poems. 1895. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1920.
5. The Wind Among the Reeds (1899)
6. The Shadowy Waters (1900)
7. In the Seven Woods (1903)
8. Poems, 1899–1905 (1906)
9. The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910)
10. Poems: Second Series (1910)
11. Poems Written in Discouragement (1913)
12. Responsibilities, and Other Poems (1916)
13. The Wild Swans at Coole, Other Verses and a Play in Verse (1917)
14. The Wild Swans at Coole (1919)
15. Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921)
16. Later Poems (1922)
17. Seven Poems and a Fragment (1922)
18. The Cat and the Moon, and Certain Poems (1924)
19. Early Poems and Stories (1925)
    • Early Poems and Stories. London: Macmillan, 1925.
20. October Blast (1927)
21. The Tower (1928)
22. A Packet for Ezra Pound (1929)
23. The Winding Stair. Signed, limited edition (1929)
24. Words for Music Perhaps, and Other Poems (1932)
25. Collected Poems (1933)
    • Collected Poems. 1933. Second edition. 1950. London: Macmillan Limited, 1967.
26. The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933)
27. The King of the Great Clock Tower (1934)
28. A Full Moon in March (1935)
29. New Poems (1938)
30. Last Poems and Two Plays (1939)
31. The Poetry of W. B. Yeats (1949)
32. 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.
33. 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.
34. 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.
35. Yeats’s Poems (1989)
    • Yeats’s Poems. Ed. A. Norman Jeffares. Appendix by Warwick Gould. London: Papermac, 1989.
36. The Poems (1990)
    • The Poems. Ed. Daniel Albright. Everyman. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1990.
37. Selected Poems (1991)
    • Selected Poems. Ed. Timothy Webb. 1991. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000.
38. A Yeats Reader (1997)
    • A Yeats Reader: A Portable Compendium of Poetry, Drama, and Prose. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. New York: Scribner, 1997.
39. 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.

Plays:


40. The Land of Heart's Desire (1894)
41. Cathleen Ní Houlihan (1902)
42. Where There is Nothing (1903)
43. The Hour Glass (1903)
44. The Hour-Glass; Cathleen ni Houlihan; The Pot of Broth (1904)
45. The King's Threshold; and On Baile's Strand (1904)
46. Deirdre (1907)
47. Two Plays for Dancers (1919)
48. Four Plays for Dancers (1921)
49. The Player Queen (1922)
50. Plays in Prose and Verse (1922)
51. Plays and Controversies (1923)
52. 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.
53. Wheels and Butterflies (1934)
54. The Words Upon the Window Pane: A Play in One Act, with Notes Upon the Play and Its Subject (1934)
55. The Herne's Egg (1938)
56. Selected Plays (1964)
    • Selected Plays. Ed. A. Norman Jeffares. 1964. Pan Classics. London: Pan Books / Macmillan, 1974.
57. 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.
58. 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.
59. 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.

Fiction:


60. 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.
61. 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.
62. Rosa Alchemica: The Tables of the Law; The Adoration of the Magi [Privately printed] (1897)
63. 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.
64. Rosa Alchemica (1904)
    • Included in: Mythologies. London: Macmillan & Co Ltd., 1959.
    • Included in: Short Fiction. Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995.
65. Stories of Red Hanrahan (1905)
    • Included in: Mythologies. London: Macmillan & Co Ltd., 1959.
    • Included in: Short Fiction. Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995.
66. Stories of Red Hanrahan and the Secret Rose (1927)
    • Included in: Mythologies. London: Macmillan & Co Ltd., 1959.
67. 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.
68. Short Fiction (1995)
    • Short Fiction. Ed. G. J. Watson. Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995.

Prose:


69. The Celtic Twilight (1893)
    • Included in: Mythologies. London: Macmillan & Co Ltd., 1959.
70. Ideas of Good and Evil (1903)
    • Included in: Essays. London: Macmillan, 1924.
    • Included in: Essays and Introductions. London: Macmillan & Co Ltd., 1961.
71. Discoveries (1907)
72. Synge and the Ireland of his Time (1911)
73. The Cutting of an Agate (1912)
    • Included in: Essays. London: Macmillan, 1924.
    • Included in: Essays and Introductions. London: Macmillan & Co Ltd., 1961.
74. Reveries Over Childhood and Youth (1916)
    • Included in: Autobiographies. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1956.
75. Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1918)
    • Included in: Essays. London: Macmillan, 1924.
    • Included in: Essays and Introductions. London: Macmillan & Co Ltd., 1961.
76. Four Years (1921)
77. The Trembling of the Veil (1922)
    • Included in: Autobiographies. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1956.
78. Essays (1924)
    • Essays: Ideas of Good and Evil / The Cutting of an Agate / Per Amica Silentia Lunae. 1903, 1912, 1918. London: Macmillan, 1924.
79. 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.
80. 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.
81. Autobiographies of William Butler Yeats (1926)
    • Included in: Autobiographies. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1956.
82. The Death of Synge, and Other Passages from an Old Diary (1928)
    • Included in: Autobiographies. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1956.
83. 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.
84. Dramatis Personae (1935)
    • Autobiographies. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1956.
85. 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.
86. Essays 1931 to 1936 (1937)
    • Included in: Essays and Introductions. London: Macmillan & Co Ltd., 1961.
87. 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.
88. On the Boiler: Essays, Poems and a Play (1939)
    • Included in: Explorations. London: Macmillan & Co Ltd., 1962.
89. 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.
90. The Senate Speeches (1960)
    • The Senate Speeches of W. B. Yeats. Ed. Donald R. Pearce. 1960. London: Faber, 1961.
91. 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.
92. 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.
93. Selected Criticism and Prose (1964)
    • Selected Criticism and Prose. Ed. A. Norman Jeffares. 1964. Pan Classics. London: Pan Books, 1980.
94. 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.
95. Memoirs (1972)
    • Memoirs: Autobiography – First Draft / Journal. Ed. Denis Donoghue. London: Macmillan Limited, 1972.
96. 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.

Translation:


97. Sophocles' King Oedipus: A Version for the Modern Stage (1928)
    • Included in: Collected Plays. 1934. Second edition. 1952. Papermac. London: Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1982.
98. The Ten Principal Upanishads (1937)
    • [with Shree Purohit Swāmi] The Ten Principal Upanishads. 1937. Faber Paper Covered Editions. London: Faber, 1970.

Edited:


99. 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.
100. 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].
101. Representative Irish Tales (1891)
102. 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.
103. [with Edwin Ellis] The Works of William Blake: Poetic, Symbolic and Critical (1893)
104. A Book of Irish Verse (1895)
105. Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsany (1912)
106. The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936)
     • The Oxford Book of Modern Verse: 1892-1935. 1936. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947.
107. [with Dorothy Wellesley] Broadsides: New Irish & English Songs (1937)

Periodical Publications:


108. "Song of the Fairies" & "Voices" (1885)
109. "Mosada" (1886)
110. "Irish Fairies" (1890)
111. "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" (1890)
112. "The Tables of the Law" (1896)
113. "Easter 1916" (1916)
114. "The Second Coming" (1920)
115. "The Resurrection" (1927)

Letters:


116. Letters on Poetry to Dorothy Wellesley. London: Oxford University Press, 1940.
117. W. B. Yeats and T. Sturge Moore: Their Correspondence, 1901-1937. Ed. Ursula Bridge. New York: Oxford University Press, 1953.
118. The Letters of W. B. Yeats. Ed. Allan Wade. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954.
119. Ah, Sweet Dancer: W. B. Yeats, Margot Ruddock: A Correspondence. Ed. Roger McHugh. Gill and Macmillan. London: Macmillan and Co Ltd., 1970.
120. The Correspondence of Robert Bridges and W. B. Yeats. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1977.
121. 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.
122. George Mills Harper. W. B. Yeats and W. T. Horton: The Record of an Occult Friendship. Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, Inc., 1980.
123. Always Your Friend: The Gonne-Yeats Letters: 1893-1938. Ed. Anna MacBride White & A. Norman Jeffares. 1992. London: Pimlico, 1993.
124. The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats. General Editor: John Kelly. Oxford English Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986-.
     1. 1865-1895. Ed. John Kelly & Eric Domville (1986)
     2. 1896-1900. Ed. Warwick Gould, John Kelly & Deirdre Toomey (1997)
     3. 1901-1904. Ed. John Kelly & Ronald Schuchard (1994)
     4. 1905-1907. Ed. John Kelly & Ronald Schuchard (2005)
     5. 1908-1910. Ed. John Kelly & Ronald Schuchard (2018)

Secondary:


125. Ellmann, Richard. Yeats: The Man and the Masks. 1948. New Preface by the Author. Oxford University Press Paperback. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979.
126. Ellmann, Richard. The Identity of Yeats. 1954. Faber Paper Covered Editions. London: Faber, 1964.
127. Ellmann, Richard. Eminent Domain: Yeats among Wilde, Joyce, Pound, Eliot and Auden. 1967. London: Oxford University Press, 1970.
128. Ellmann, Richard. a long the riverrun: Selected Essays. 1988. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989.
129. Foster, R. F. W. B. Yeats: A Life. I: The Apprentice Mage, 1865-1914. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
130. Foster, R. F. W. B. Yeats: A Life. II: The Arch-Poet, 1915-1939. 2003. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
131. Hardwick, Joan. The Yeats Sisters: A Biography of Susan and Elizabeth Yeats. Pandora. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1996.
132. Hone, Joseph. W. B. Yeats: 1865-1939. 1943. Pelican Biographies. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.
133. Jeffares, A. Norman. A Commentary on The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. London: Macmillan & Co Ltd., 1968.
134. Jeffares, A. Norman, & A. S. Knowland. A Commentary on The Collected Plays of W. B. Yeats. 1975. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1975.
135. Kiely, Benedict. Yeats’ Ireland: An Illustrated Anthology. 1989. London: Aurum Press, 1990.
136. Maddox, Brenda. George’s Ghosts: A New Life of W. B. Yeats. 1999. Picador. London: Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 2000.
137. Mikhail, E. H., ed. W. B. Yeats: Interviews and Recollections. Foreword by A. Norman Jeffares. 2 vols. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1977.
138. Miller, Liam. Yeats’s West. Dublin: The Irish Tourist Board, n.d. [c. 1987]
139. Stallworthy, Jon. Between the Lines: Yeats’s Poetry in the Making. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963.

Liam Miller: Yeats's West (n.d.)

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• category - English Poetry (post-1900): Alphabetical

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