Inhoudsopgave:
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In this multi-volume edition, the poetry of W.B. Yeats (1865â1939) is presented in full, with newly established texts and detailed, wide-ranging commentary. Yeats began to write verse in the nineteenth century, and over time his own arrangements of poems repeatedly revised and rearranged both texts and canon. This edition of Yeatsâs poetry presents all his verse, both published and unpublished, including a generous selection of textual variants from the many manuscript and printed sources. The edition also supplies the most extensive commentary on Yeatsâs poetry to date, explaining specific references, and setting poems in their contexts; it also gives an account of the vast range of both literary and historical influences at work on the verse. The poems are presented in order of composition, and major revisions or rewritings of poems result in separate inclusions (in chronological sequence) for these writings as they were subsequently reconceived by the poet. In this third volume, Yeatsâs poetry of the first decade of the twentieth century is brought into sharp focus, revealing the extent of his efforts to re-fashion a style that had already made him a well-known poet. All of the major modes in Yeatsâs earlier work are subject to radical re-imagining in these years, from poetic narrative founded in Irish myth, in poems such as âBaile and Aillinnâ and âThe Old Age of Queen Maeveâ, to the symbolist drama-poetry of The Shadowy Waters, here edited in its two (completely different) versions of 1900 and 1906. In a decade when the theatre was one of Yeatsâs principal concerns, his lyric poems, which were becoming increasingly explicit in personal terms, began to discover new intensities of conversational pitch and mythic resonance. Poems such as âThe Folly of Being Comfortedâ, âAdamâs Curseâ, âNo Second Troyâ, and âThe Fascination of Whatâs Difficultâ are given close attention in this new edition, alongside topical and epigrammatic pieces that are often passed over in accounts of Yeatsâs development. The evolving complexities of Yeatsâs personal and political lives are crucial to his artistic growth in these years, and the commentary gives these generous attention, showing how the poetry both feeds upon and often transcends the circumstances of its composition. The volume offers strong evidence for this decade as a crucial one in Yeatsâs poetic life, in which the poet created wholly new registers for his verse as well as new dimensions for his imaginative vision. |
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