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William Butler Yeats
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(Born 1865 in Dublin, Ireland, Died
1939)
Biography:
Considered one of the most famous poets of all time, Yeats
was also a successful playwright. Many of his plays feature his poetic narratives.
He
was educated at schools in London and Dublin. At the age of twenty-three,
he published The Wanderings of Oisin', a long narrative poem that
gained him the reputation of a noteworthy poet. The Celtic Twilight,
a book of peasant legends, was published in 1893.
With regard to his playwriting, his three most
famous works are The Countess Cathleen (1892), The Land of
Heart's Desire (1894), and Cathleen ni Houlihan (1903). He
helped found the Abbey Theatre in 1904, and wrote several more plays for
the Abbey Theatre in the years to follow. He received the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1923. H also served as senator of the Irish Free State from
1922 to 1928.
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Autobiographies
(Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Vol. 3)
Autobiographies consists of six autobiographical works
that William Butler Yeats published together in the mid-1930s to form a single,
extraordinary memoir of the first fifty-eight years of his life, from his earliest
memories of childhood to winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. This volume provides a
vivid series of personal accounts of a wide range of figures, and it describes Yeats's
work as poet and playwright, as a founder of Dublin's famed Abbey Theatre, his involvement
with Irish nationalism, and his fascination with occultism and visions. This book is most
compelling as Yeats's own account of the growth of his poetic imagination. Yeats thought
that a poet leads a life of allegory, and that his works are comments upon it. Autobiographies
enacts his ruling belief in the connections and coherence between the life that he led and
the works that he wrote. It is a vision of personal history as art, and so it is the one
truly essential companion to his poems and plays. Edited by William H. O'Donnell and
Douglas N. Archibald, this volume is available for the first time with invaluable
explanatory notes and includes previously unpublished passages from candidly explicit
first drafts.
Paperback - 608
pages (March 1999) $14.40
Hardcover - 608
pages Vol 3 (March 1999) $24.50
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The Collected Letters
of W.B. Yeats: 1901-1904 (Vol. 3)
Hardcover (June 1994) $65.00
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The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats
William Butler Yeats, whom many consider this century's greatest poet,
began as a bard of the Celtic Twilight, reviving legends and Rosicrucian symbols. By the
early 1900s, however, he was moving away from plush romanticism, his verse morphing from
the incantatory rhythms of "I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree" into
lyrics "as cold and passionate as the dawn." At every stage, however, Yeats
plays a multiplicity of poetic roles. There is the romantic lover of When You Are Old
and A Poet to His Beloved ("I bring you with reverent Hands / The books of
my numberless dreams..."). And there are the far more bitter celebrations of Maud
Gonne, who never accepted his love and engaged in too much politicking for his taste:
"Why should I blame her that she filled my days / With misery, or that she would of
late / Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways, / Or hurled the little streets upon
the great, / Had they but courage equal to desire?" There is also the poet of
conscience--and confrontation. His 1931 Remorse for Intemperate Speech ends:
"Out of Ireland have we come. / Great hatred, little room, / Maimed us at the start.
/ I carried from my mother's womb / A fanatic heart."
Yeats was to explore several more sides of himself, and of
Ireland, before his Last Poems of 1938-39. Many are difficult, some snobbish,
others occult and spiritualist. As Brendan Kennelly writes, Yeats "produces both
poppycock and sublimity in verse, sometimes closely together." On the other hand,
many prophetic masterworks are poppycock-free, for example, The Second Coming
("Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; /
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the
world...") and such inquiries into inspiration as Among School Children
("O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the
dance?"). And at his best, Yeats extends the meaning of love poetry beyond the
obviously romantic: love becomes a revolutionary emotion, attaching the poet to friends,
history, and the passionate life of the mind. (Kerry Fried)
This collection includes all of the poems authorized for
publication by Yeats in his lifetime and his notes for this collection, as well as
explanatory notes by esteemed Yeats scholar, Richard J. Finneran. The authorized canon of
one of the world's most beloved poets, this is a collection of every poem William Butler
Yeats approved for publication during his lifetime.
List of Poems:
Paperback - 544 pages 2nd Rev edition (September 1996)
$14.40
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Collected Plays of
W.B. Yeats
Hardcover (May 1995)
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Early Poems
Paperback - 111 pages (January 1994) $1.20
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| Eleven Plays of William Butler Yeats
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The Herne's Egg
Hardcover - 77 pages (September 1991) $24.95
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| Hour-Glass and Other Plays
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The Irish Dramatic
Movement (Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Vol. 8)
The poet's memoir of the Irish Literary Revival at the turn of
the century, a movement for a renewed Irish literature and a commitment to Irish
nationalism. Includes his impassioned defense of a popular Irish theater.
Hardcover (February 1999) $21.00
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The Poems
(Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Vol. 1)
Here is the complete, standard edition of the verse of Ireland's
greatest lyric poet, including poems from Yeats's plays and essays--edited by
internationally acclaimed Yeats scholar Richard J. Finneran. This top-selling reference
has been steadily in demand since its original publication in 1989.
Though this edition has been reset and revised, the changes are
not as shocking as the 1984 edition, which included 100 extra pages of notes, changes in
language and punctuation, and, most significantly, a redefinition of the Last Poems.
Richard Finneran has had the courage to reorder the poems according to notes that Yeats
made shortly before his death. Readers may be surprised to find that Under Ben Bulben,
the poet's powerful and self-mythologizing epitaph, no longer ends the collection, as it
has for more than thirty years. In its place they will discover the wistful Politics:
("How can I, that girl standing there, / My attention fix / On Roman or on Russian /
Or on Spanish politics...") Yet devotees of either ending will agree that this is a
truly necessary volume, indeed, one of the few. As Seamus Heaney writes, "All readers
of Yeats will need this book; when they open it they will feel a surprise like that
experienced by St. Brendan the Navigator and his crew when they disembarked upon an island
that turned out to be the back of a dormant sea monster."
Hardcover - 784 pages 2nd edition (October 1997) $28.00
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Selected Poems and Four Plays of William Butler Yeats
A new and revised edition of a standard selection of the Nobel
Prize-winning poet's poems and four of his plays includes a foreword, introduction,
glossary, bibliography, index, and comprehensive notes. Remaining the definitive selection
of W.B. Yeats's finest work, this revised edition of M.L. Rosenthal's classic selection of
211 of Yeats's poems and four of his plays represents the essential achievement of
Ireland's greatest lyric poet.
Paperback - 270 pages 4th edition (September 1996)
$13.60
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Shadows - A Trinity of Plays
Paperback - 80 pages (September 1998) $10.95
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| Two Plays for Dancers
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The Yeats
Reader: A Portable Compendium of Poetry, Drama, and Prose
Yeats scholar Richard J. Finneran has carefully chosen the best
and most representative selections from the body of poetry, drama, memoirs, critical
essays, and writings on mysticism that have established Yeats as one of the greatest
writers in the history f the English language. The Yeats
Reader is the first single volume to encompass the full range of William Butler Yeats's
talents. It presents over a hundred of Yeats's best-known poems, plus eight plays, a
sampling of his prose tales, and excerpts from his published autobiographical and critical
writings. Also included are selections from the memoirs left unpublished at his death and
complete introductions written for the projected Scribner edition of his collected works.
These are supplemented by unobtrusive annotation and a chronology of the life.
Paperback - 480
pages (December 1997) $12.80
Hardcover - 480
pages (December 1997) $22.75
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