I seldom take notice of business-oriented newsletters, and usually discard them after a cursory glance. A few days ago, however, a newsletter from Carcanet caught my eye, because it opened with a poem that resonates with an old memory and celebrates something that academics all too often look down at and dismiss as 'pre-modern', 'Romantic', etc.: the pre-Celtic Twilight poetry of W. B. Yeats. Even though I was lucky, as an undergraduate student, to have had an English Lit teacher who actually liked this Yeats and encouraged us to engage with his first poems, I now realise it's been years since I last read them. By coincidence, yesterday, rummaging through a couple of old boxes for hidden treasures, I was delighted to find a dog-eared copy of this wonderful Fairy & Folk Tales of Ireland that Yeats edited between 1888 and 1892, and which inspired in me the same sense of awe as when I read the ghost/horror/gothic tales of Edgar Allan Poe, Lafcadio Hearn, Sheridan Le Fanu... The temptation is too strong to resist, so, once again, I'll have to redefine my reading priorities for the next few days, and fully immerse myself in the Irish other-world of changelings, ghosts, demon cats & other evil spirits, trooping & solitary fairies, witches, and, of course, good ol' Cuchulain... No waste of time, for sure.
In the meantime, here goes the Carcanet message, with due thanks for the thoughtful selection.
'He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’ by W.B. Yeats
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
The First Yeats: Poems by W.B. Yeats 1889-1899
Unrevised texts, edited with an introduction by Edward Larrissy
W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) began writing poetry as a devotee of Blake, Shelley, the pre-Raphaelites, and of nineteenth-century Irish poets including James Clarence Mangan and Samuel Ferguson. By the end of his life, he had, as T.S. Eliot said, created a poetic language for the twentieth century. The First Yeats deepens our understanding of the making of that poetic imagination, reprinting the original texts of Yeats's three early collections, The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889), The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (1892), and The Wind Among the Reeds (1899). The poems were subsequently heavily revised or discarded. Among them are some of the best-loved poems in English – 'The LakeIsle of Innisfree', 'He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven' – fresh and unfamiliar here in their original contexts, together with Yeats's lengthy notes which were drastically cut in the collected editions.
This illuminating edition by Edward Larrissy, editor of W.B. Yeats, The Major Works (Oxford University Press, 2000), includes an introduction that clarifies the literary, historical and intellectual context of the poems, detailed notes, and a bibliography. It offers essential material for reading – and revaluing – one of the great modern poets.
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was one of the greatest poets and dramatists of the twentieth century. Educated in London and in Dublin, the young Yeats was at the centre of fin de siècle London’s literary society and his friends included George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde. His first volume of verse appeared in 1886. He returned to Ireland in 1891 and was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival. In 1895 he achieved poetic recognition with Poems. After the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922, he became a senator. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. Yeats died in France in 1939.
Edward Larrissy is Professor of Poetry at Queen’s University, Belfast. He is the author of Yeats the Poet: The Measures of Difference (Harvester, 1994) and the editor of W.B. Yeats, The Major Works (Oxford University Press, 2000).
Unrevised texts, edited with an introduction by Edward Larrissy
W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) began writing poetry as a devotee of Blake, Shelley, the pre-Raphaelites, and of nineteenth-century Irish poets including James Clarence Mangan and Samuel Ferguson. By the end of his life, he had, as T.S. Eliot said, created a poetic language for the twentieth century. The First Yeats deepens our understanding of the making of that poetic imagination, reprinting the original texts of Yeats's three early collections, The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889), The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (1892), and The Wind Among the Reeds (1899). The poems were subsequently heavily revised or discarded. Among them are some of the best-loved poems in English – 'The LakeIsle of Innisfree', 'He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven' – fresh and unfamiliar here in their original contexts, together with Yeats's lengthy notes which were drastically cut in the collected editions.
This illuminating edition by Edward Larrissy, editor of W.B. Yeats, The Major Works (Oxford University Press, 2000), includes an introduction that clarifies the literary, historical and intellectual context of the poems, detailed notes, and a bibliography. It offers essential material for reading – and revaluing – one of the great modern poets.
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was one of the greatest poets and dramatists of the twentieth century. Educated in London and in Dublin, the young Yeats was at the centre of fin de siècle London’s literary society and his friends included George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde. His first volume of verse appeared in 1886. He returned to Ireland in 1891 and was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival. In 1895 he achieved poetic recognition with Poems. After the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922, he became a senator. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. Yeats died in France in 1939.
Edward Larrissy is Professor of Poetry at Queen’s University, Belfast. He is the author of Yeats the Poet: The Measures of Difference (Harvester, 1994) and the editor of W.B. Yeats, The Major Works (Oxford University Press, 2000).
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