The Tower (1928),: Manuscript Materials (The Cornell Yeats) - Hardcover

Yeats, W. B.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801446104 ISBN 13: 9780801446108

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2007

Synopsis

W. B. Yeats's The Tower, first published in 1928 and later revised a number of times, arrived in its final form after many years of dedicated labor. Yeats here is concerned with the "rooting of mythology in the earth," binding almost every poem to the image of Thoor Ballylee, the building in the west of Ireland that he saw as a permanent symbol of his work. Still considered one of the seminal volumes of modern poetry, its themes are both intensely personal and determinedly universal: old age and its attendant problems, the relationship between Nature and Art, the natural and the supernatural or spiritual, the self and the world.

In her unsigned review of the collection, Virginia Woolf was to declare, "Mr Yeats has never written more exactly and more passionately." Yet the poet was never satisfied, and in this volume we can trace the alterations, some subtle and others startling, of the hard-earned technique resulting in such major works as "Sailing to Byzantium," "Among School Children," "Leda and the Swan," and "Meditations in Time of Civil War."

In the Cornell Yeats edition of The Tower, materials presented include transcriptions and photographs of the earliest recoverable drafts and selected transcriptions from the most interesting manuscripts and annotated typescripts. Collations of closely related materials, including printed readings preceding the 1928 volume, are attached to transcriptions of the texts to which they lead or from which they stem. Appendixes reveal the different ordering of titles in The Tower that Yeats provided both before and after 1928.

About this title

About the Authors

The late Richard J. Finneran was Professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Jared Curtis is Professor Emeritus of English at Simon Fraser University. Ann Saddlemyer is Professor Emeritus of Drama at University of Toronto and adjunct Professor of English at the University of Victoria.

Jared Curtis is Emeritus Professor of English and Visiting Scholar in English at the University of Washington. He is Coordinating Editor of The Cornell Yeats and editor or coeditor of several volumes, including "The Resurrection": Manuscript Materials. He is the 2013 recipient of the M. L. Rosenthal Award for distinguished contributions to Yeats studies.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0801446104
• ISBN 13: 9780801446108
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 728
• Editor: Finneran Richard J., Curtis Jared, Saddlemyer Ann