The Tower (1928): Manuscript Materials »

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.

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." Materials 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.

Acknowledgments     xi
Abbreviations     xiii
Census of Manuscripts     xv
Introduction     xxix
Chronology of Manuscripts     xli
Transcription Principles and Procedures     li
The Tower
Sailing to Byzantium     3
The Tower     51
Meditations in Time of Civil War     153
Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen     199
The Wheel     257
Youth and Age     261
The New Faces     263
A Prayer for my Son     279
Two Songs from a Play     287
Wisdom     315
Leda and the Swan     329
On a Picture of a Black Centaur   Edmund Dulac     353
Among School Children     361
Colonus' Praise     399
The Hero, the Girl, and the Fool     411
Owen Ahern and his Dancers     421
A Man Young and Old
First Love     443
Human Dignity     469
The Mermaid     479
The Empty Cup     483
His Memories     489
The Friends of his Youth     491
Summer and Spring     493
The Secrets of the Old     495
His Wildness     503
A Man Young and Old     505
The Three Monuments     523
From 'Oedipus at Colonus'     543
The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid     565
All Souls' Night     643
Appendixes
Fragments, I     661
Fragments, II     663
A. Draft of Contents for Seven Poems and a Fragment (1922)     665
Draft of Contents for October Blast (1927)     667
A. Preliminary Arrangements of The Tower Poems     668
Order and Contents of The Tower     669