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    The Wild Swans at Coole: A Facsimile Edition
    The Wild Swans at Coole: A Facsimile Edition
    The Wild Swans at Coole: A Facsimile Edition
    Ebook120 pages1 hour

    The Wild Swans at Coole: A Facsimile Edition

    By William Butler Yeats and George Bornstein

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    About this ebook

    A stunning facsimile of the 1919 first edition of William Butler Yeats’s The Wild Swans at Coole: an elegant volume showcasing these poems as they would have first been read and a complement to facsimile editions The Winding Stair and The Tower.

    Published in 1919 during W.B. Yeats’s “middle stage” and composed of poems written during World War I, The Wild Swans at Coole is contemplative and elegiac. This collection captures Yeats at a time when he was looking back on his life, coming to terms with the realities of modern war, reflecting on lost love, and defining his place in the world as a poet. It features forty poems, among them “The Fisherman,” “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory,” “The Wild Swans at Coole,” and “On Being Asked for a War Poem.”

    This facsimile of the original 1919 edition presents the reader with the work in its original form, with handsome old fashioned type, how readers and Yeats himself would have seen it in the early twentieth century. A great gift book and collector’s item, The Wild Swans at Coole also includes an Introduction and notes by esteemed Yeats scholar George Bornstein.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherScribner
    Release dateMar 7, 2017
    ISBN9781501106057
    The Wild Swans at Coole: A Facsimile Edition
    Author

    William Butler Yeats

    William Butler Yeats is generally considered to be Ireland’s greatest poet, living or dead, and one of the most important literary figures of the twentieth century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923.

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      Book preview

      The Wild Swans at Coole - William Butler Yeats

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      CONTENTS

      PREFACE

      INTRODUCTION TO YEATS’S THE WILD SWANS AT COOLE

      THE WILD SWANS AT COOLE (1919)

      ABOUT W. B. YEATS

      NOTES

      PREFACE

      This edition offers a facsimile of the expanded first London edition of The Wild Swans at Coole, first published in London by Macmillan on March 11, 1919. It was a considerable expansion of the earlier 1917 volume published in Ireland by the Cuala Press on November 17, 1917. The copy used is from my own personal library, except for the cover and spine design, which, because of greater clarity, come from the identical second printing in the Special Collections Library of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The present edition adds an introduction tracing the assembly and design of the 1919 volume as well as annotations to that edition, including editorial notes on the poems.

      I am grateful to the late Richard J. Finneran of the University of Tennessee for suggesting this project some years ago, and to Ashley Gilliam at Scribner for support in following it through. I am also grateful to the splendid librarians at the University of Michigan, and particularly to the head of Special Collections, Martha O’Hara Conway. Rebecca Huffman served as capable and cheerful research assistant.

      This edition is dedicated to my daughter, Rebecca York Bornstein, and to Alex Roy on the occasion of their marriage.

      INTRODUCTION TO YEATS’S THE WILD SWANS AT COOLE

      As the great critic Hugh Kenner pointed out some time ago, Yeats not only wrote poems but also arranged them into carefully wrought books. The place to look for light on any poem is in the adjacent poems, argued Kenner. And the unit in which to inspect and discuss his development is not the poem or sequence of poems but the volume.¹ Yeats’s drafts and notebooks contain numerous alternate arrangements of the poems for each of his individual volumes and for his collected ones as well. A lifelong reviser, he went through draft after draft when working on a poem, and continued the process even after first publication. This series of Scribner paperback facsimiles thus gives readers a sense of the state of the texts in their first important gathering into individual volumes. In Yeats’s case, that sense involves not only verbal reproduction but also layout and design. From the much-reprinted 1895 Poems onward, Yeats gained enough control to incorporate those latter features into his books, as his admired William Blake had done before him. For the first commercial Macmillan edition of The Wild Swans at Coole he worked with his friend and favorite designer, T. Sturge Moore. This introduction sketches the assembling and design of that crucial 1919 volume.

      The Wild Swans at Coole appeared in two different book formats before 1920. The earlier and shorter volume, The Wild Swans at Coole: Other Verses and a Play in Verse (1917), contained seventeen lyrics, including the seven-part Upon a Dying Lady, along with the Noh-like Cuchulain play At the Hawk’s Well. That version was published by Cuala Press, a fine-arts private press operated chiefly by Yeats’s sister Lolly that featured handcrafting and small print runs (in this case, only four hundred copies). Two years later, Macmillan published the revised and expanded volume, deleting the play and adding sixteen additional poems to double the size of the collection and nearly quadruple the print run. In the order in which they appear in the volume, the new poems sprang from the death of aviator Major Robert Gregory in World War I; Yeats’s marriage to Georgie Hyde-Lees; his rocky relations with Maud Gonne and her daughter, Iseult; and the resultant emergence of material related to Yeats’s book of esoteric philosophy A Vision (1925; revised 1937). It is the second, longer version of The Wild Swans at Coole that is reproduced here. Unlike the more defeatist tone of the 1917 volume, the revised one shows a progress from the ambiguous opening title poem through immersion in life and death to the final imaginative success of The Double Vision of Michael Robartes at the end.

      That development starts with the evolution of the title poem itself. Copious manuscript drafts display a dark tone of death and imaginative defeat. The first one sketches natural decline with its mention of low water, brown leaves, and sunset: The water in the lake is low / The leaves turn brown / And [I] go out toward sun set / To number the swans. . . . / The autumn rains have not begun. The entire poem, dated October 1916 and first published in The Little Review in June 1917, sounds a mournful, elegiac note ending with an invocation of

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