Series:

Yeats Facsimile Edition

4 total works

Cover of The Wild Swans at Coole
The Wild Swans at Coole, a collection of twenty-nine poems and the play At the Hawk's Well, was first published by the Cuala Press in November 1917. The title poem of the collection had first appeared in the Little Review in June of that year. Macmillan (London and New York) republished the poems in March 1919 without the play but with an additional seventeen poems. The completed volume, also called The Wild Swans at Coole, represents the "middle stage" of Yeats' writing and is concerned, amongst other themes, with Irish nationalism and the creation of an Irish aesthetic.

Cover of Tower

Tower

by William Butler Yeats

Published 1 January 2004
The first edition of W. B. Yeats's The Tower appeared in bookstores in London on Valentine's Day, 1928. His English publisher printed just 2,000 copies of this slender volume of twenty-one poems, priced at six shillings. The book was immediately embraced by book buyers and critics alike, and it quickly became a bestseller.

Subsequent versions of the volume made various changes throughout, but this Scribner facsimile edition reproduces exactly that seminal first edition as it reached its earliest audience in 1928, adding an introduction and notes by esteemed Yeats scholar Richard J. Finneran.

Written between 1912 and 1927, these poems ("Sailing to Byzantium," "Leda and the Swan," and "Among School Children" among them) are today considered some of the best and most famous in the entire Yeats canon. As Virginia Woolf declared in her unsigned review of this collection, "Mr. Yeats has never written more exactly and more passionately."

Cover of The Winding Stair and Other Poems
An exact facsimile of the 1933 first edition of W.B. Yeats's The Winding Stair and Other Poems, a famously beautiful, elegant volume intended as a companion to The Tower-with an Introduction and notes by the eminent Yeats scholar George Bornstein.

Published in 1933 when W.B. Yeats was sixty-eight, The Winding Stair and Other Poems is his longest stand-alone volume of verse. Previously unavailable as a single volume, this beautiful edition will appeal to both general readers and textual scholars.

Featuring sixty-four poems from the late 1920s and early 1930s, among them such masterpieces as "Blood and the Moon," "Byzantium," the Coole Park poems, "Vacillation," and two separately titled long sequences including the Crazy Jane poems and ending with the exquisite lyric "From the 'Antigone,'" this edition also includes an Introduction and notes by celebrated Yeats scholar George Bornstein. These poems amply justify T. S. Eliot's contention that Yeats was one of the few poets "whose history is the history of their own time, who are a part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them."

Cover of The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933)
W. B. Yeats's The Winding Stair and Other Poems was published in 1933 when Yeats was sixty-eight, ten years after he won the Nobel Prize and six years before his death in 1939. Yeats famously invoked in "Adam's Curse" the time he spent "stitching and unstitching" the lines of his work, but he also spent considerable time stitching and unstitching his poems to each other. The Winding Stair demonstrates that care, combining and reordering the poems of two earlier publications in an edition intended as the companion volume to The Tower, published in 1928.

This Scribner facsimile edition reproduces exactly the pages of the elegantly planned and designed first edition of The Winding Stair and Other Poems as it first appeared, including a photo of the cover design on which Yeats collaborated. It adds an introduction and notes by celebrated Yeats scholar George Bornstein.

Yeats's longest separate volume of verse, it features sixty-four poems written in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Among them are such masterpieces as "Blood and the Moon," "Byzantium," the Coole Park poems, "Vacillation," and two separately titled long sequences ending with the exquisite lyric "From the 'Antigone.'" These poems amply justify T. S. Eliot's contention that Yeats was one of the few poets "whose history is the history of their own time, who are a part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them."