Autobiographies is made up of six autobiographical works that Yeats published in the mid 1930s. Together, they provide a fascinating insight into the first 58 years of his life. The work provides memories of his early childhood, through to his experience of winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. The volume contains explanatory notes and previously unpublished passages from candidly explicit first drafts.
The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume IX: Early Articles and Reviews is part of a fourteen-volume series under the general editorship of eminent Yeats scholars Richard J. Finneran and George Mills Harper. This first complete edition includes virtually all of the Nobel laureate's published work, in authoritative texts with extensive explanatory notes. Coedited by John P. Frayne and Madeleine Marchaterre, Early Articles and Reviews assembles the earliest examples of Yeats's critical prose, from 1886 to the end of the century -- articles and reviews that were not collected into book form by the poet himself. Gathered together now, they show the earliest development of Yeats's ideas on poetry, the role of literature, Irish literature, the formation of an Irish national theater, and the occult, as well as Yeats's interaction with his contemporary writers. As seen here, Yeats's vigorous activity as magazine critic and propagandist for the Irish literary cause belies the popular picture created by his poetry of the "Celtic Twilight" period, that of an idealistic dreamer in flight from the harsh realities of the practical world. This new volume adds four years' worth of Yeats's writings not included in a previous (1970) edition of his early articles and reviews. It also greatly expands the background notes and textual notes, bringing this compilation up to date with the busy world of Yeats scholarship over the last three decades. Early Articles and Reviews is an essential sourcebook illuminating Yeat's reading, his influences, and his literary opinions about other poets and writers.
An exact facsimile of the 1933 first edition of W.B. Yeats’s The Winding Stair and Other Poems, a famously beautiful, elegant volume intended as a companion to The Tower—with an Introduction and notes by the eminent Yeats scholar George Bornstein. Published in 1933 when W.B. Yeats was sixty-eight, The Winding Stair and Other Poems is his longest stand-alone volume of verse. Previously unavailable as a single volume, this beautiful edition will appeal to both general readers and textual scholars. Featuring sixty-four poems from the late 1920s and early 1930s, among them such masterpieces as “Blood and the Moon,” “Byzantium,” the Coole Park poems, “Vacillation,” and two separately titled long sequences including the Crazy Jane poems and ending with the exquisite lyric “From the ‘Antigone,’” this edition also includes an Introduction and notes by celebrated Yeats scholar George Bornstein. These poems amply justify T. S. Eliot’s contention that Yeats was one of the few poets “whose history is the history of their own time, who are a part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them.”
Ann Saddlemyer's biography of W. B. Yeats's wife, George, portrays an extraordinarily talented, intelligent, and self-effacing woman, whose creative influence has never before been fully understood. She was wife and manager of a famous poet, and mother to his children, but in her own right also an inspired visionary and a practical woman of the arts. Georgie Hyde Lees was raised in London's literary salons, where arts, anthroposophy and the occult met. An accomplished linguist, art student and literary scholar, she married W. B. Yeats when she was 25, and he 52. Her supernatural "automatic writing" became the inspiration of Yeats's poetry and thought for the last 20 years of his life, yet she always concealed the depth of their collaboration. Close friend of many writers and poets, among them Frank O'Connor and Ezra Pound, she spent her long widowhood steering the "Yeats industry" and actively assisting younger scholars and writers. For the first time, this intelligent and creative woman is allowed to take center stage. Drawing on memoirs and a wealth of unknown and unpublished sources, this biography by the distinguished scholar Ann Saddlemyer reveals someone much more significant than just '"Mrs. W. B. Yeats"--a personality at once visionary and practical, and an important figure in twentieth-century literary history.
The second and final volume in Roy Foster's acclaimed biography of W. B. Yeats covers the second half of Yeats's life, taking in his controversial political involvements, continued supernatural experiments, his extraordinary marriage, a series of love affairs, and the writing of his greatest poetry. Life and work are woven closely together to create a rich, new, uniquely authoritative, and immensely involving treatment of one of the greatest lives of modern times.
