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A Competition for Eternity: Yeats's Revision of His Later Poems
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Lady Gregory recorded in her journal in 1925 that Yeats, scorning what he believed to be excessive praise of certain nineteenth and twentieth century poets, said, “These critics ought to think more of the writing. They have given up God, they shouldn't give up perfection.” “Well”, Lady Gregory added, “he practises what he preaches; is working over those old poems as if for a competition for eternity.”1 Various critics have noted the results of Yeats's competition for eternity in his repeated and elaborate revisions of his early poems; but it has not been demonstrated that he continued to the end of his life to revise almost all his work, new poems as well as old, for successive printings, nor has any study been made of the nature and purposes of Yeats's revisions of the great poems of his last thirty years.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1949
References
1 Lady Gregory's Journals, ed. Lennox Robinson (New York: Macmillan, 1947), p. 263.
2 The richest groups of such drafts are contained in Joseph Hone, W. B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1943) and in Yeats, Letters on Poetry to Dorothy Wellesley (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1940). Hone's quotations of early drafts are usually fragmentary, but the letters to Lady Gerald Wellesley include complete first or early versions of many poems of the thirties. See also A. Norman Jeffares, “The Byzantine Poems of W. B. Yeats”, RES, xxii (Jan., 1946), 44–52, and “W. B. Yeats and His Methods of Writing Verse”, Nineteenth Century, cxxxix (March, 1946), 123–128; Katharine Tynan Hinkson, Twenty-Five Years: Reminiscences (New York: Devin-Adair, 1913), and The Middle Years (Boston & New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1917); Lady Gregory's Journals; Lady Gregory, Hugh Lane's Life and Achievement (New York: Dutton, 1921); Richard Ellmann, Yeats: the Man and the Masks (New York: Macmillan, 1948).
3 Collected Works (Stratford: Shakespeare Head Press, 1908), ii, 1.
4 Hermathena, No. lxiv (Nov., 1944), 90–101; No. lxv (May, 1945), 40–57.
5 Both the MS of Easter, 1916 and the letter to Shorter are in the Berg Collection, New York Public Library.
6 For changes in punctuation in “A Crazed Girl” and “Three Marching Songs” (Last Poems) which do seriously affect meaning, cf. Grattan Freyer's letter on Yeats, TLS, Apr. 20, 1946, p. 187.
7 A study of Yeats's revisions reveals a number of puzzling misprints in his Collected Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1933) which need to be noted because the edition, frequently reprinted, is the text of Yeats ordinarily read in this country. The most famous of these misprints, corrected in the last issue (1948), is “Soldier Aristotle” for “Solider Aristotle” in Among School Children, stanza 6, an inversion of a single letter which has produced elaborate and ingenious explanations of the stanza. Cf. Delmore Schwartz, “An Unwritten Book”, Southern Review, vii (Winter, 1941), 471–491. In the following misprints, every other edition reads differently, unless otherwise noted:
8 New Republic, li (June 29, 1927), 148.
9 The Tower (New York: Macmillan, 1928), p. 4.
10 Michael Robartes and the Dancer (Dundrum: Cuala Press, 1920), p. 4
11 Later Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1924), p. 327.
12 “Thoughts upon the Present State of the World”, Dial, lxxi (Sept., 1921), 266
13 The Tower (1928), p. 35.
14 These phrases later read “famous ivories / And all the golden grasshoppers and bees.”
15 The Wild Swans at Cook (Dundrum: Cuala Press, 1917), p 16; The Wild Swans at Coole (New York: Macmillan, 1919), p. 68; Later Poems (1924), p. 287. Yeats's holograph of this poem (with a few changes, due perhaps to errors in memory) is reproduced in “The Fatherless Children of France”, American Art Association Catalogue (1921).
16 Collected Poems (1933), p. 178.
17 Poetry, vii (Feb., 1916), 220.
18 The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), p. 45.
19 Dial, lxxiv (Jan., 1923), 51.
20 London Mercury, vii (Jan., 1923), 233.
21 “Anima Mundi”, Per Amica Silentia Lunae (New York: Macmillan, 1918), pp. 51–52.
22 “Reminiscences of Yeats”, Tomorrow, vii (May, 1947), 20.
23 “There is a Queen in China”, Poetry, vii (Feb., 1916), 224.
24 “His Phoenix”, The Wild Swans at Coole (1917), p. 11; Later Poems (1924), p. 277.
25 “His Phoenix”, Collected Poems (1933), p. 173.
26 Dial, lxxxiii (Aug., 1927), 92.
27 London Mercury, xvi (Aug., 1927), 347, and later printings.
28 Did, lxxxiii (Aug, 1927), 91–93; London Mercury, xvi (Aug., 1927), 346–348; October Blast (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1927), pp. 12–15.
29 For the earliest drafts of this stanza see Jeffares, “W. B. Yeats and His Methods of Writing Verse”, loc. cit.
30 The Tower (1928), p. 58.
31 New Republic, li (June 29, 1927), 149.
32 Criterion, v (June, 1927), 291–292; October Blast (1927), p. 8.
33 October Blast, pp. 1–2.
34 The Exile, No. 3 (Spring, 1928), 2; The Tower, p. 2; Collected Poems (1933), p. 224.
35 This title was finally given to a very early poem (1886), originally called Miserrimus.
36 Yeats finally used no title for this lyric, beginning “Here is fresh matter, poet.”
37 “Yeats's Early Poems”, Living Age, cccxxvii (Nov. 28, 1925), 465.
38 Poetry, iv (May, 1914), 54; Responsibilities: Poems and a Play (Dundrum: Cuala Press, 1914), p. 19.
39 Later Poems (1924), pp. 199–200.
40 The Exile, No. 3 (Spring, 1928), 1.
41 The Tower (1928), p. 2.
42 Stories of Michael Robartes and His Friends: An Extract from a Record Made by His Pupils: and a Play in Prose (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1931), p. 45. In an even earlier version the last line reads, “And vain the Doric discipline”, Adelphi, iv (June, 1927), 729.
43 “Two Songs from a Play”, Collected Poems (1933), p. 246.
44 The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), pp. 36–37.
45 “Shepherd and Goatherd”, Collected Poems (1933), p. 165.
46 “Meditations on Death”, i, New Republic, lxv (Jan. 14, 1931), 244.
47 Collected Poems (1933), p. 283.
48 New Republic, lxiv (Nov. 12, 1930), 351.
49 The Winding Stair (New York: Fountain Press, 1929), p. 6. Windy instead of winding in the first line is surely a misreading of a handwritten MS such as Yeats sometimes furnished his publishers.
50 The Winding Stair (New York: Macmillan, 1933), p. 4.
51 Poetry, i (Dec, 1912), 68.
52 Responsibilities (1914), p. 36.
53 Letters on Poetry to Dorothy Wellesley, p. 93.
54 Last Poems and Plays (New York: Macmillan, 1940), p. 21.
55 The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1938), p. 371.
56 Little Review, v (Oct., 1918), 3; The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), p. 21; Later Poems (1924), p. 251. In the last two of these printings a dash follows lines 1 and 3.
57 Collected Poems (1933), p. 158.
58 Easter, 1916, privately printed for his friends by Clement Shorter (n. d.).
59 Dial, lxix (Nov., 1920), 458.
60 Dial, lxxvi (June, 1924), 495; The Cat and the Moon and Certain Poems (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1924), p. 16.
61 The Tower (1928), p. 51.
62 Letters on Poetry to Dorothy Wellesley, p. 45.
63 Dial, lxxiv (Jan., 1923), 52; London Mercury, vii (Jan., 1923), 234.
64 Little Review, iv (June, 1917), 9. The poem is here dated October, 1916.
65 Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1932), pp. 9–11. The title in Collected Poems, ‘1933‘, is “Coole and Ballylee, 1931.”
66 The King of the Great Clock Tower, Commentaries and Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1935), p. 39.
67 Last Poems and Plays, pp. 61–64.
68 A Full Moon in March (London: Macmillan, 1935), pp. 57–58.
69 Letters on Poetry to Dorothy Wellesley, p. 158.
70 Last Poems and Plays, p. 47.
71 The Heme's Egg and Other Plays (New York: Macmillan, 1938), pp. v–vi.
72 Poetry, xlv (March, 1935), 299–310.
73 Both late versions are in The Heme's Egg and Other Plays (1938).
74 “If I Were Four-and-Twenty”, Living Age, ccciii (Oct. 4, 1919), 25.
76 Letters on Poetry to Dorothy Wellesley, p. 47.
76 Cf. comment on revision of “The Double Vision of Michael Robartes”, Hone, p. 370.
77 Collected Works (1908), viii, 199.
78 Passages in this paper are quoted with the permission of The Macmillan Company, New York, from Lady Gregory's Journals (1947), from Yeats's Collected Poems (1933), Collected Plays (1935), Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1918), The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), Later Poems (1924), The Tower (1928), The Winding Stair (1933), The King of the Great Clock Tower: Commentaries and Poems (1935), The Heme's Egg and Other Plays (1938), Last Poems and Plays (1940); with the permission of the Oxford University Press, London, from Letters on Poetry to Dorothy Wellesley (1940); with the permission of Mrs. W. B. Yeats and of Macmillan and Company, London, from A Full Moon in March (1935); with the permission of Mrs. Yeats from The Collected Works (1908), from Easter, 1916 (n. d.), from The Winding Stair (New York: Fountain Press, 1929), from Yeats's poems in periodicals, and from the following publications of the Cuala Press: Responsibilities; Poems and a Play (1914), The Wild Swans at Coole (1917), Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1920), The Cat and the Moon and Certain Poems (1924), October Blast (1927), Stories of Michael Robartes and His Friends (1931), and Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems (1932).