The tower : manuscript materials

From reviews of The Cornell Yeats series:"For students of Yeats the whole series is bound to become an essential reference source and a stimulus to important critical re-readings of Yeats's major works.

In a wider context, the series will also provide an extraordinary and perhaps unique insight into the creative process of a great artist."-Irish Literary Supplement"I consider the Cornell Yeats one of the most important scholarly projects of our time."-A.

Walton Litz, Princeton University, coeditor of The Collected Poems of William Carols Williams and Personae: The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound"The most ambitious of the many important projects in current studies of Yeats and perhaps of modern poetry generally....

The list of both general and series editors, as well as prospective preparers of individual volumes, reads like a Who's Who of Yeats textual studies in North America.

Further, the project carries the blessing of Yeats's heirs and bespeaks an ongoing commitment from a major university press....

The series will inevitably engender critical studies based on a more solid footing than those of any other modern poet....

Its volumes will be consulted long after gyres of currently fashionable theory have run on."-Yeats Annual (1983)W.

B. Yeats's The Tower, first published in 1928 and later revised a number of times, arrived in its final form after many years of dedicated labor.

Yeats here is concerned with the "rooting of mythology in the earth," binding almost every poem to the image of Thoor Ballylee, the building in the west of Ireland that he saw as a permanent symbol of his work.

Still considered one of the seminal volumes of modern poetry, its themes are both intensely personal and determinedly universal: old age and its attendant problems, the relationship between Nature and Art, the natural and the supernatural or spiritual, the self and the world.

In her unsigned review of the collection, Virginia Woolf was to declare, "Mr Yeats has never written more exactly and more passionately."Yet the poet was never satisfied, and in this volume we can trace the alterations, some subtle and others startling, of the hard-earned technique resulting in such major works as "Sailing to Byzantium," "Among School Children," "Leda and the Swan," and "Meditations in Time of Civil War." Materials include transcriptions and photographs of the earliest recoverable drafts and selected transcriptions from the most interesting manuscripts and annotated typescripts.

Collations of closely related materials, including printed readings preceding the 1928 volume, are attached to transcriptions of the texts to which they lead or from which they stem.

Appendixes reveal the different ordering of titles in The Tower that Yeats provided both before and after 1928.