In this multi-volume edition, the poetry of W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) 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 This edition of Yeats's poetry presents all his verse, both published and unpublished, including a generous selection of textual variants from the many manuscript and printed sources.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 Yeats's 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 second volume, the poems of Yeats's early maturity emerge in the contexts of his engagement with Irish history and myth, along with nationalist politics; his increasing involvement with ritual magic and esoteric lore; and his turbulent, often unhappy, personal life. The poems of The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (1892) reveal a poet of intense narrative power and metaphorical resource, adept at transforming miscellaneous sources into haunting and original poems. A major revision of his earlier narrative, 'The Wanderings of Oisin', takes place in this decade when Yeats is also taken up with the composition of elaborate and uncanny symbolic lyrics, many of them resulting from his love for Maud Gonne, that are finally collected in The Wind Among the Reeds (1899). This edition makes it possible to trace in detail Yeats's debts to folklore and magic, alongside his involved and often difficult private and public life, in poetry of exceptional complexity and power.

About the Author

Peter McDonald is an Irish poet and critic, whose literary criticism includes Serious Poetry: Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill (2002) and Sound Intentions: The Workings of Rhyme in Nineteenth-Century Poetry (2012). He has edited the Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice, and is the author of numerous articles on nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry.His own Collected Poems appeared in 2012. He is Professor of British and Irish Poetry at the University of Oxford, and Christopher Tower Student and Tutor in Poetry at Christ Church, Oxford.

Book Information
ISBN 9780367529314
Author Peter McDonald
Format Paperback
Page Count 596
Imprint Routledge
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
Weight(grams) 453g