Yeats's Legacies E-Book

Warwick Gould

• Herausgeber: Open Book Publishers
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

The two great Yeats Family Sales of 2017 and the legacy of the Yeats family’s 80-year tradition of generosity to Ireland’s great cultural institutions provide the kaleidoscope through which these advanced research essays find their theme. Hannah Sullivan’s brilliant history of Yeats’s versecraft challenges Poundian definitions of Modernism; Denis Donoghue offers unique family memories of 1916 whilst tracing the political significance of the Easter Rising; Anita Feldman addresses Yeats’s responses to the Rising’s appropriation of his symbols and myths, the daring artistry of his ritual drama developed from Noh, his poetry of personal utterance, and his vision of art as a body reborn rather than a treasure preserved amid the testing of the illusions that hold civilizations together in ensuing wars. Warwick Gould looks at Yeats as founding Senator in the new Free State, and his valiant struggle against the literary censorship law of 1929 (with its present-day legacy of Irish anti-blasphemy law still presenting a constitutional challenge). Drawing on Gregory Estate documents, James Pethica looks at the evictions which preceded Yeats’s purchase of Thoor Ballylee in Galway; Lauren Arrington looks back at Yeats, Ezra Pound, and the Ghosts of The Winding Stair (1929) in Rapallo. Having co-edited both versions of A Vision, Catherine Paul offers some profound reflections on ‘Yeats and Belief’. Grevel Lindop provides a pioneering view of Yeats’s impact on English mystical verse and on Charles Williams who, while at Oxford University Press, helped publish the Oxford Book of Modern Verse. Stanley van der Ziel looks at the presence of Shakespeare in Yeats’s Purgatory. William H. O’Donnell examines the vexed textual legacy of his late work, On the Boiler while Gould considers the challenge Yeats’s intentionalism posed for once-fashionable post-structuralist editorial theory. John Kelly recovers a startling autobiographical short story by Maud Gonne. While nine works of current biographical, textual and literary scholarship are reviewed, Maud Gonne is the focus of debate for two reviewers, as are Eva Gore-Booth, Constance and Casimir Markievicz, Rudyard Kipling, David Jones, T. S. Eliot and his presence on the radio.

Leseprobe

In the same series

YEATSANNUALS Nos. 1, 2Edited by Richard J. Finneran

YEATSANNUALS Nos. 3–8, 10–11, 13Edited by Warwick Gould

YEATSANDWOMENYEATSANNUAL No. 9: A Special NumberEdited by Deirdre Toomey

THATACCUSINGEYE: YEATSANDHISIRISHREADERSYEATSANNUAL No. 12: A Special Number Edited by Warwick Gould and Edna Longley

YEATSANDTHENINETIESYEATSANNUAL No. 14: A Special NumberEdited by Warwick Gould

YEATS’S COLLABORATIONSYEATSANNUAL No. 15: A Special NumberEdited by Wayne K. Chapman and Warwick Gould

POEMSANDCONTEXTSYEATSANNUAL No. 16: A Special Number Edited by Warwick Gould

INFLUENCEANDCONFLUENCEYEATSANNUAL No. 17: A Special Number Edited by Warwick Gould

THELIVINGSTREAMYEATSANNUAL No. 18: A Special IssueEssays in Memory of A. Norman JeffaresEdited by Warwick GouldFreely available at http://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/194

YEATS’S MASKYEATSANNUAL No. 19: A Special IssueEdited by Margaret Mills Harper and Warwick GouldFreely available at http://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/233

ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF EAMONNCANTWELLYEATSANNUAL No. 20: A Special NumberEdited by Warwick GouldFreely available at https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/380

YEATS ANNUAL No. 21

W. B. Yeats in the fin de siècle. The Elliot & Fry image, purchased from an untraced picture archive. From pencilled notes on the verso, the image was copyrighted to Elliot & Fry, and each reproduction incurred a fee of 14/– to the London Electrotype Agency. A fee of that sum had been paid for Richardson, ‘The World Writers’, perhaps a series in an untraced periodical, and the image had been filed with ‘English Portraits of Yeats’. © Private Collection, London, all rights reserved.

YEATS’S LEGACIES

YEATS ANNUAL No. 21

A Special Issue

Edited by Warwick Gould

in association with the Institute of English StudiesSchool of Advanced Study, University of London

http://www.openbookpublishers.com

© 2018 Warwick Gould. Copyright of individual chapters is maintained by the chapters’ authors.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information:

Warwick Gould (ed.), Yeats’s Legacies: Yeats Annual No. 21. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2018. https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0135

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ISBN Paperback: 978-1-78374-454-1

ISBN Hardback: 978-1-78374-455-8

ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-78374-456-5

ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-78374-457-2

ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978-1-78374-458-9

DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0135

Cover image: Yeats Annual Fleuron (Front Cover, Spine, Dedication Page) Based upon Thomas Sturge Moore’s rose design as used in his illustrations for H. P. R. Finberg’s translation of Count Villiers de L’Isle Adam’s Axel with Yeats’s preface (London: Jarrolds Publishers Ltd., 1925), and elsewhere on cover designs for Yeats’s books, most notably that for Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1918), this fleuron was created courtesy of the late Riette Sturge Moore.

Front Cover Vignette: The hawk is taken from the top-board of Responsibilities and Other Poems (London: Macmillan, 1916), Private Coll., London, Image Warwick Gould. The design is by Thomas Sturge Moore, showing Yeats’s change of livery when he moved his books to Macmillan as his principal trade publisher. The book was published on 10 October 1916, the same day as that firm issued his Reveries over Childhood and Youth, also with a Sturge Moore cover-design.

Cover design: Anna Gatti.

All paper used by Open Book Publishers is SFI (Sustainable Forestry Initiative), PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification Schemes) and Forest Stewardship Council(r)(FSC(r) certified.

Printed in the United Kingdom, United States and Australia by Lightning Source for Open Book Publishers (Cambridge, UK).

The Editor dedicates his work on this volume to WILLIAM H. O’DONNELL in gratitude for his meticulous textual scholarship and restless curiosity in annotation

Contents

List of Illustrations

xiii

Abbreviations

xix

Editorial Board

xxvii

Notes on Contributors

xxix

Editor’s Introduction

xxxv

Acknowledgements and Editorial Information

lxix

ESSAYS

How Yeats Learned to Scan

HANNAH SULLIVAN

3

EASTER 1916

DENIS DONOGHUE

39

The Invisible Hypnotist: Myth and Spectre in Some Post-1916 Poems and Plays by W. B. Yeats

ANITA FELDMAN

63

‘Satan, Smut & Co.’: Yeats and the Suppression of Evil Literature in the Early Years of the Irish Free State

WARWICK GOULD

123

‘Uttering, mastering it’? Yeats’s Tower, Lady Gregory’s Ballylee, and the Eviction of 1888

JAMES PETHICA

213

Fighting Spirits: W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and the Ghosts of The Winding Stair (1929)

LAUREN ARRINGTON

269

W. B. Yeats and the Problem of Belief (with an Afterword, ‘The Centaur and the Daimon’ by WARWICK GOULD)

CATHERINE E. PAUL

295

Charles Williams and W. B. Yeats

GREVEL LINDOP

317

Shakespeare in Purgatory: ‘A Scene of Tragic Intensity’

STANLEY VAN DER ZIEL

355

The Textual History of Yeats’s On the Boiler

WILLIAM H. O’DONNELL

391

RESEARCH UPDATES

Maud Gonne’s Fictional Affair: ‘A Life’s Sketch’

Edited and with notes by JOHN KELLY

449

Conflicted Legacies: Yeats’s Intentions and Editorial Theory

WARWICK GOULD

479

REVIEW ESSAYS AND REVIEWS

‘Both beautiful, one a gazelle’: An Essay reviewing Sonja Tiernan, Eva Gore-Booth: An Image of Such Politics and Lauren Arrington, Revolutionary Lives: Constance and Casimir Markievicz

DEIRDRE TOOMEY

545

W. B. Yeats, On Baile’s Strand: Manuscript Materials, ed. by Jared Curtis and Declan Kiely

RICHARD ALLEN CAVE

557

W. David Soud, Divine Cartographies: God, History and Poeisis in W. B. Yeats, David Jones, and T. S. Eliot

GREVEL LINDOP

563

Yeats, Philosophy, and the Occult, ed. by Matthew Gibson and Neil Mann

R. A. GILBERT

569

Alexander Bubb, Meeting Without Knowing It: Kipling and Yeats at the Fin de Siècle

JAD ADAMS

575

Emily C. Bloom, The Wireless past: Anglo-Irish Writers and the BBC, 1931–1968

EMILIE MORIN

579

Ezra Pound, Posthumous Cantos, ed. by Massimo Bacigalupo

STODDARD MARTIN

585

Adrian Frazier, The Adulterous Muse: Maud Gonne, Lucien Millevoye and W. B. Yeats with an Afterword by DEIRDRE TOOMEY

STODDARD MARTIN

589

Publications Received

599

List of Illustrations

Note: All enquiries regarding copyrights in individual plates should be made c/o the editor at [email protected].

Yeats Annual Fleuron (Front Cover, Spine, Dedication Page) Based upon Thomas Sturge Moore’s rose design as used in his illustrations for H. P. R. Finberg’s translation of Count Villiers de L’Isle Adam’s Axel with Yeats’s preface (London: Jarrolds Publishers Ltd., 1925), and elsewhere on cover designs for Yeats’s books, most notably that for Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1918), this fleuron was created courtesy of the late Riette Sturge Moore.

Front Cover Vignette: The hawk is taken from the top-board of Responsibilities and Other Poems (London: Macmillan, 1916), Private Coll., London, Image Warwick Gould. The design is by Thomas Sturge Moore, showing Yeats’s change of livery when he moved his books to Macmillan as his principal trade publisher. The book was published on 10 October 1916, the same day as that firm issued his Reveries over Childhood and Youth,also with a Sturge Moore cover-design.

Frontispiece W. B. Yeats in the fin de siècle. From pencilled notes on the verso, this hitherto unknown image had been copyrighted to Elliot & Fry, and each reproduction incurred a fee of 14/– to the London Electrotype Agency. A fee of that sum had been paid for Richardson, ‘The World Writers’, perhaps a series in an untraced periodical, and the image had been filed with ‘English Portraits of Yeats’ in some newspaper picture archive. © Private Collection, London, all rights reserved.

Plates

1.

Yeats family snapshot c. 1927, of Thoor Ballylee and its cottages, taken from the ‘acre of stony ground’ or cabbage patch over the road. Image courtesy Private Collection London.

xxxvi

2.

Plate 1 cropped to approximate the ‘view’ of the tower and cottages depicted in Plate 3. Image courtesy Private Collection London.

xxxvii

3.

The cropped centre panel of Thomas Sturge Moore’s top board for The Tower (1928). Image courtesy Private Collection, London.

xxxvii

4.

Yeats family heirlooms as clustered by Sotheby’s, London, for the frontispiece of their Yeats: The Family Collection,the catalogue accompanying the sale of that name on 27 September 2017. Image courtesy Philip Errington, and © Sotheby’s, New Bond St., London, all right reserved.

xlii

5.

Antonio Mancini’s 1908 pastel portrait of W. B. Yeats used as the basis for the frontispiece to Vol. V of The Collected Works in Verse and Prose (1908). Image courtesy Philip Errington, and Sotheby’s, New Bond St., London.

xlviii

6.

John Butler Yeats oil portrait of W. B. Yeats in a basket chair, reading in the overgrown garden at 3 Blenheim Rd., Bedford Park, London, c. 1888–1889. Image courtesy Philip Errington, and Sotheby’s, New Bond St., London.

xlix

7–8.

Two images of pages from Yeats’s ‘10 Ashfield Terrace’ sketchbook, lot 70 in the Sotheby’s sale, courtesy Philip Errington, and Sotheby’s, New Bond St., London.

li

9.

Image of page facing Plate 7 in Yeats’s ‘10 Ashfield Terrace’ sketchbook, lot 70 in the Sotheby’s sale, courtesy Philip Errington, and Sotheby’s, New Bond St., London.

liii

10.

Image of page from Yeats’s ‘10 Ashfield Terrace’ sketchbook, lot 70 in the Sotheby’s sale, courtesy Philip Errington, and Sotheby’s, New Bond St., London.

liv

11.

Image of fragment of verse in Yeats’s ‘10 Ashfield Terrace’ sketchbook, lot 70 in the Sotheby’s sale, courtesy Philip Errington, and Sotheby’s, New Bond St., London.

lv

12.

Jack B. Yeats’s drawing ‘MAKE PROVISION FOR YOUR OLD AGE!!!!’ from an undated letter to Lady Gregory as illustrated for lot 416, Figgis Rare Books catalogue, c. 1982–1996 (Private Collection, London). Image courtesy Mr. Neville Figgis, House of Figgis Rare Books, Letterfrack, Co. Galway. Present whereabouts of original unknown.

lxiv

13.

Centre fold of Pears’ Annual, 1925, with an illuminated design for ‘“The Cherry Tree”: English Carol by Cecil J. Sharp’. Decorated by (Richard) Kennedy North. Image courtesy Private Collection, London.

127

14.

Front Cover, the Irish Independent, 11 October 1927. Image courtesy National Library of Ireland.

132

15.

Cuchulain slays the dragon of ‘Tainted Literature: Front Cover of Our Boys Annual 1915. Image courtesy Christian Brothers Province Centre, Dublin.

136

16.

Brother Canice Craven at his Editor’s desk, shining the light of Angelic Warfare onto a waste-paper basket ready to receive ‘devilish literature coming into this country’, with his Editor’s notes below. From Our Boys, 4 September 1924. Image courtesy Christian Brothers Province Centre, Dublin.

146

17.

Detail, Plate 14, of the Irish Independent, 11 October 1927. Image courtesy National Library of Ireland.

147

18.

The Pears’ Annual book-burning as imagined by ‘G. A.’, Our Boys,5 February 1925, 499, and as preserved in the Evil Literature files, National Archives, Dublin. Image courtesy the National Archives of Ireland, Dublin.

149

19.

Front page of To-Morrow 1:1, August 1924. Private Collection, London. Image courtesy Warwick Gould.

161

20.

‘Leda and the Swan’, as printed in To-morrow, August 1924, 2. Private Collection, London. Image courtesy Warwick Gould.

164

21.

‘To all Artists and Writers’, manifesto or editorial, as printed in To-morrow, August 1924,4. Private Collection, London. Image courtesy Warwick Gould.

167

22.

‘An Old Poem Re-written’ in its original placement, followed by Oliver St. John Gogarty’s ‘To Some Spiteful Persons’in The Irish Statesman,8 November 1924 (266–67). Image courtesy the National Library of Ireland, Dublin.

173

23.

Galley Proofs of Early Poems and Stories (1925), corrected by Yeats. Image courtesy The Henry W. And Albert A. Berg Collection, New York Public Library (Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations).

175

24.

Detail of Plate 23. Image courtesy The Henry W. And Albert A. Berg Collection, New York Public Library (Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations).

176

25.

Further Detail of Plate 23. Image courtesy The Henry W. And Albert A. Berg Collection, New York Public Library (Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations).

177

26 a-b.

The Cherry-Tree Carol’, Cuala Press Broadside version (No. 7, December 1909), illustrated by Jack B. Yeats, the final three stanzas of which are on the following page (detail). Images courtesy Digital Library@Villanova University.

184

27.

Douglas Hyde’s parallel text Irish and English versions taken down in Mayo. From Religious Songs of Connacht (1906, 280–81). Private Collection, London. Image courtesy Warwick Gould.

185

28–29.

Two ‘Black Lists’ from the ‘Evil Literature’ papers, a printed and subsequently (26b.) a typed list of ‘Some Objectionable Papers and Periodicals’, showing the addition of Pears’ Annual. Images courtesy the National Archives of Ireland, Dublin.

189

30.

Titian’s ‘Sacred and Profane Love’ (1514), Borghese Gallery, Rome. Image Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tiziano_-_Amor_Sacro_y_Amor_Profano_(Galer%C3%ADa_Borghese,_Roma,_1514).jpg

195

31.

Sketches made by Lady Gregory at Ballylee, 14 August 1895. None of the Cunninghams’ daughters are identified as ‘Maud’ on the 1901 Census, so this may have been a nickname or Gregory’s error for ‘Margaret’ (aged about 6 in 1895). Image courtesy Colin Smythe.

217

32.

Possibly Yeats’s first written mention of Ballylee in a manuscript revision of ‘Ballykeele’ to ‘Ballylee’ in the printed text of AE’s poem ‘The Well of All-Healing’, in Lady Gregory’s copy of A Celtic Christmas (The Irish Homestead Christmas No.) 1897. Image courtesy John J. Burns Library, Boston College.

219

33.

‘Mr Brennan singing Great Coole Demesne’ by ‘E. P.’ (probably Lady Gregory’s sister in-law, Eleanor Persse) circa. 1888. Image courtesy the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection (Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations), New York Public Library.

225

34.

Ballylee Castle, detail of sketch by Lady Gregory dated 14 August 1895 (see above, Plate 31). Image courtesy Colin Smythe.

227

35.

The Millwheel and Tower at Ballylee, Sketches by Lady Gregory, n.d. Image courtesy Colin Smythe.

228

36.

Elizabeth Cunningham (c. 1890-d. 1945) late in life. Image courtesy Private Collection, Ireland.

235

37.

Abbey Theatre Programme for King Lear, 27 October 1930 and following nights. Image courtesy James Hardiman Library, NUI, Galway.

367

38–39.

Set designs for King Lear, Abbey Theatre, November 1928by Dorothy Travers Smith. Images courtesy James Hardiman Library, NUI, Galway.

369

40.

Detail of typescript letter from W. B. Yeats to F. R. Higgins, December 1938 (HRHRC,Yeats Collection, Box 6, Folder 7). Image courtesy the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Texas.

418

41.

Jack B. Yeats: Original Drawing for front cover of On the Boiler, with Jack Yeats’s instruction ‘To Block Maker Please keep original drawing Clean’. Image courtesy Philip Errington, and Sotheby’s, New Bond St., London.

426

42.

Constance and Eva Gore-Booth at the opening of the Drumcliffe Co-Operative Creamery c. 1895. Image Courtesy Sligo County Museum and Library.

546

Abbreviations

Au

Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1955).

AVA

A Vision: An Explanation of Life Founded upon the Writings of Giraldus and upon certain Doctrines attributed to Kusta Ben Luka (London: privately printed for subscribers only by T. Werner Laurie, Ltd., 1925). See also CVA.

AVB

A Vision (London: Macmillan, 1962).

Berg

Books and Manuscripts, The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, New York Public Library (Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations).

BG

Ann Saddlemyer, Becoming George: The Life of Mrs W. B. Yeats (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

BIV1, 2

A Book of Irish Verse selected from Modern Writers with an Introduction and Notes by W. B. Yeats (London: Methuen, 1895, 1900

BL Add. MS

Additional Manuscript, The British Library, London (followed by number).

BL Macmillan

Later papers from the Macmillan Archive, British Library, London.

Bodley

Bodleian Library, Oxford.

Bradford

Curtis B. Bradford, Yeats at Work (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965).

Brotherton

Manuscript, The Brotherton Collection, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds.

CH

W. B. Yeats: The Critical Heritage, ed. by A. Norman Jeffares (London: Henley; Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977).

ChronY

A W. B. Yeats Chronology by John S. Kelly (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

CL1, 2, 3, 4

The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats: Volume I, 1865–1895,ed. by John Kelly and Eric Domville; Volume II, 1896–1900, eds. Warwick Gould, John Kelly, Deirdre Toomey; Volume III, 1901–1904, and Volume IV, 1905–1907,eds. John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986, 1997, 1994, 2005).

CL InteLex

The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, gen. ed. John Kelly (Oxford: Oxford University Press [InteLex Electronic Edition], 2002). Letters cited by accession number.

CM

W. B. Yeats: A Census of the Manuscripts, by Conrad A. Balliet, with the assistance of Christine Mawhinney (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1990).

CVA

A Critical Edition of Yeats’s A Vision (1925), ed. by George Mills Harper and Walter Kelly Hood (London: Macmillan, 1978).

CW1

The Poems: Second Edition (New York: Scribner, 1997), ed. by Richard J. Finneran and replacing The Poems: Revised (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1989; London: Macmillan, 1989), PR,which replaced The Poems: A New Edition (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1983; London: Macmillan London Ltd., 1984), PNE,as the first volume of The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats (formerly The Collected Edition of the Works of W. B. Yeats).

CW2

The Plays, eds. David R. Clark and Rosalind E. Clark (New York: Scribner, 2001), Vol. II of The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats (formerly The Collected Edition of the Works of W. B. Yeats).

CW3

Autobiographies, eds. William H. O’Donnell and Douglas N. Archibald, assisted by J. Fraser Cocks III and Gretchen Schwenker (New York: Scribner, 1999), vol. III of The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats (formerly The Collected Edition of the Works of W. B. Yeats).

CW5

Later Essays, ed. by William H. O’Donnell, with assistance from Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994), vol. V of The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats (formerly The Collected Edition of the Works of W. B. Yeats).

CW6

Prefaces and Introductions: Uncollected Prefaces and Introductions by Yeats to Works by other Authors and to Anthologies Edited by Yeats, ed. by William H. O’Donnell (London: Macmillan, 1988), vol. VI of The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats (formerly The Collected Edition of the Works of W. B. Yeats).

CW7

Letters to the New Island,eds. George Bornstein and Hugh Witemeyer (London: Macmillan, 1989), vol. VII of The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats (formerly The Collected Edition of the Works of W. B. Yeats).

CW8

The Irish Dramatic Movement,eds. Mary FitzGerald and Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 2003), vol. VIII of The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats (formerly The Collected Edition of the Works of W. B. Yeats).

CW9

Early Articles and Reviews: Uncollected Articles and Reviews Written Between 1886 and 1900, eds. John P. Frayne and Madeleine Marchaterre (New York: Scribner, 2004), vol. IX of The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats (formerly The Collected Edition of the Works of W. B. Yeats).

CW10

Later Articles and Reviews: Uncollected Articles, Reviews, and Radio Broadcasts Written after 1900, ed. by Colton Johnson (New York: Scribner, 2000), vol. X of The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats (formerly The Collected Edition of the Works of W. B. Yeats).

CW12

John Sherman AND Dhoya,ed. by Richard J. Finneran (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1991), vol. XII of The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats (formerly The Collected Edition of the Works of W. B. Yeats).

CW13

A Vision: The Original 1925 Version, ed. by Catherine E. Paul and Margaret Mills Harper (New York: Scribner, 2008), vol. XIII of The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats (formerly The Collected Edition of the Works of W. B. Yeats).

CWVP1–8

The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats (Stratford-on-Avon: The Shakespeare Head Press, 1908), 8 vols.

DC

Druid Craft: The Writing of The Shadowy Waters, Manuscripts of W. B. Yeats,transcribed, edited and with a commentary by Michael J. Sidnell, George P. Mayhew, David R. Clark (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1971).

Diaries

Lady Gregory’s Diaries 1892–1902,ed. by James Pethica (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1996).

E&I

Essays and Introductions (London and New York: Macmillan, 1961).

Emory

Books and Manuscripts in the Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University.

Ex

Explorations,sel. Mrs W. B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1962; New York: Macmillan, 1963).

EYP

Richard J. Finneran, Editing Yeats’s Poems (London: Macmillan, 1983).

EYPR

Richard J. Finneran, Editing Yeats’s Poems: A Reconsideration (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990).

FFTIP

Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, edited and selected by W. B. Yeats (London: Walter Scott, Ltd., 1888).

G-YL

The Gonne-Yeats Letters 1893–1938: Always Your Friend, ed. by Anna MacBride White and A. Norman Jeffares (London: Hutchinson, 1992).

Harvard

Manuscript, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

HRHRC

Books and Manuscripts, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.

I&R

W. B. Yeats: Interviews and Recollections, ed. by E. H. Mikhail (London: Macmillan, 1977), 2 vols.

IFT

Irish Fairy Tales,edited with an introduction by W. B. Yeats (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1892).

J

W. B. Yeats: A Classified Bibliography of Criticism, second edition, revised and enlarged by K. P. S. Jochum (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990). Item nos. or page no. preceded by ‘p.’.

JBYL

Letters to his Son W. B. Yeats and Others 1869–1922 by J. B. Yeats, edited with a Memoir by Joseph Hone and a Preface by Oliver Elton (London: Faber & Faber, 1944).

Kansas

Manuscripts in the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas, Lawrence.

L

The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. by Allan Wade (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954; New York: Macmillan, 1955).

LBP

Letters from Bedford Park: A Selection from the Correspondence (1890–1901) of John Butler Yeats, edited with an introduction and notes by William M. Murphy (Dublin: The Cuala Press, 1972).

LDW

Letters on Poetry from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley, introduction by Kathleen Raine (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1964).

Life 1

W. B. Yeats: A Life, I: The Apprentice Mage, by R. F. Foster (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

Life 2

W. B. Yeats: A Life, II: The Arch-Poet, by R. F. Foster (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

Lilly

Manuscript in the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington.

LJQ

The Letters of John Quinn to W. B. Yeats, ed. by Alan B. Himber, with the assistance of George Mills Harper (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983).

LMR

‘Ah, Sweet Dancer’: W. B. Yeats, Margot Ruddock, A Correspondence, ed. by Roger McHugh (London and New York: Macmillan, 1970).

LNI

Letters to the New Island by William Butler Yeats, ed. and with an introduction by Horace Reynolds (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934).

LRB

The Correspondence of Robert Bridges and W. B. Yeats, ed. by Richard J. Finneran (London: Macmillan, 1977; Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1978).

LTWBY1, 2

Letters to W. B. Yeats,ed. by Richard J. Finneran, George Mills Harper and William M. Murphy, with the assistance of Alan B. Himber (London: Macmillan; New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 2 vols.

MBY

Manuscript in the Collection of Michael Butler Yeats.

McGarry

Place Names in the Writings of W. B. Yeats by James P. McGarry, ed. with additional material by Edward Malins and with a preface by Kathleen Raine (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe Ltd., 1976).

Mem

Memoirs: Autobiography—First Draft: Journal,transcribed and edited by Denis Donoghue (London: Macmillan, 1972; New York: Macmillan, 1973).

Myth

Mythologies (London and New York: Macmillan, 1959).

Myth 2005

Mythologies, ed. by Warwick Gould and Deirdre Toomey (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

MYV1, 2

The Making of Yeats’s ‘A Vision’: A Study of the Automatic Script, by George Mills Harper (London: Macmillan; Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), 2 vols.

NC

A. Norman Jeffares, A New Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1984).

NLI

Manuscripts in the National Library of Ireland, Dublin.

NLS

Manuscripts in the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh.

NYPL

Manuscripts in the New York Public Library.

Norwood

Manuscripts, Norwood Historical Society, Day House, Norwood, MA.

OBMV

The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1895–1935, chosen by W. B. Yeats (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936).

Princeton

Manuscript in the Scribner Archive, Firestone Library, Princeton University.

Quinn Cat.

Complete Catalogue of the Library of John Quinn sold by auction in five parts [with printed prices] (New York: The Anderson Galleries, 1924), 2 vols.

SB

The Speckled Bird by William Butler Yeats: An Autobiographical Novel with Variant Versions: New Edition, incorporating recently discovered manuscripts,edited and annotated by William H. O’Donnell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

SQ

A Servant of the Queen: Reminiscences, ed. by Maud Gonne MacBride, A. Norman Jeffares and Anna MacBride White (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1994).

SS

The Senate Speeches of W. B. Yeats, ed. by Donald R. Pearce (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960; London: Faber & Faber, 1961).

TB

Theatre Business: The Correspondence of the First Abbey Theatre Directors: William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory and J. M. Synge, ed. by Ann Saddlemyer (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe; University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1982).

TSMC

W. B. Yeats and T. Sturge Moore: Their Correspondence, 1901–1937, ed. by Ursula Bridge (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; New York: Oxford University Press, 1953).

UP1

Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats, Vol. 1, ed. by John P. Frayne (London: Macmillan; New York: Columbia University Press, 1970).

UP2

Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats, Vol. 2, ed. by John P. Frayne and Colton Johnson (London: Macmillan, 1975; New York: Columbia University Press, 1976).

VBWI

Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland, collected and arranged by Lady Gregory, with two Essays and Notes by W. B. Yeats and with a foreword by Elizabeth Coxhead (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe Ltd.; New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).

VP

The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. by Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1957). Cited from the corrected third printing of 1966.

VPl

The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W. B. Yeats, ed. by Russell K. Alspach, assisted by Catherine C. Alspach (London and New York: Macmillan, 1966). Cited from the corrected second printing of 1966.

VSR

The Secret Rose, Stories by W. B. Yeats: A Variorum Edition, ed. by Warwick Gould, Phillip L. Marcus, and Michael J. Sidnell, second rev. and enl. ed. (London: Macmillan, 1992).

Wade

Allan Wade, A Bibliography of the Writings of W. B. Yeats,rev. Russell K. Alspach, third ed. (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1968). Cited by item no. and/or page no. preceded by ‘p.’.

WWB1, 2, 3

The Works of William Blake Poetic, Symbolic, and Critical, Edited with Lithographs of the Illustrated ‘Prophetic Books’, and a Memoir and Interpretation by Edwin John Ellis and William Butler Yeats, 3 vols. (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1893).

YA1, 2, etc.

Yeats Annual (London: Macmillan, nos. 1–17, 1982–2007; Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, nos. 18–, https://www.openbookpublishers.com/section/39/1), cited by no.

YAACTS

Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies, ed. by Richard J. Finneran (publishers vary, 1983–1999), cited by no.

YGYL

W. B. Yeats and George Yeats: The Letters, ed. by Ann Saddlemyer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

YL

Edward O’Shea, A Descriptive Catalog of W. B. Yeats’s Library (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1985).

YO

Yeats and the Occult, ed. by George Mills Harper (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada; Niagara Falls, New York: Maclean-Hunter Press, 1975).

YP

Yeats’s Poems, ed. and ann. by A. Norman Jeffares, with an appendix by Warwick Gould (London: Macmillan, 1989). Cited from the second, revised edition of 1991.

YT

Yeats and the Theatre, ed. by Robert O’Driscoll and Lorna Reynolds (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada; Niagara Falls, New York: Maclean-Hunter Press, 1975).

YVP1, 2, 3, 4

Yeats’s Vision Papers (London: Macmillan, 1992; Palgrave 2001), gen. ed. George Mills Harper, assisted by Mary Jane Harper, Vol. 1: The Automatic Script: 5 November 1917–1918 June 1918,ed. by Steve L. Adams, Barbara J. Frieling, and Sandra L. Sprayberry; Vol. 2: The Automatic Script: 25 June 1918–1929 March 1920,ed. by Steve L. Adams, Barbara J. Frieling, and Sandra L. Sprayberry; Vol. 3: Sleep and Dream Notebooks, Vision Notebooks 1 and 2, Card File,ed. by Robert Anthony Martinich and Margaret Mills Harper; Vol. 4:‘The Discoveries of Michael Robartes’ Version B [‘The Great Wheel’ and ‘The Twenty-Eight Embodiments’],ed. by George Mills Harper and Margaret Mills Harper, assisted by Richard W. Stoops, Jr.

Editorial Board

Richard Allen Cave

Edna Longley

Wayne K. Chapman

Neil Mann

Seamus Deane

William H. O’Donnell

Denis Donoghue

Marjorie Perloff

Jacqueline Genet

James L. Pethica

Margaret Mills Harper

Ronald Schuchard

John Harwood

Michael J. Sidnell

K. P. S. Jochum

Colin Smythe

John Kelly

C. K. Stead

Series Editor: Warwick Gould

Research Editor: Deirdre Toomey

Notes on the Contributors

Jad Adams is a Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies, University of London. He is an historian working as an author and an independent television producer. He specializes in radical characters from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the Decadence of the 1890s. His literary work includes Kipling (2004), Madder Music, Stronger Wine: The Life of Ernest Dowson (2000) and Hideous Absinthe: A History of the Devil in a Bottle (2004). His most recent book is Women and the Vote: A World History (2014); other books include Tony Benn: A Biography (1992 and, updated, 2011) Gandhi: Naked Ambition (2009) Pankhurst (2003) and The Dynasty: The Nehru-Gandhi Story. His television work includes biographies of Kitchener, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and of historical characters from London’s East End. See http://www.jadadams.co.uk/.

Lauren Arrington is a Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool. She is the author of Revolutionary Lives: Constance and Casimir Markievicz (2016, reviewed in this volume) and W. B. Yeats, the Abbey Theatre, Censorship, and the Irish State (2010). In the autumn of 2017, she was Burns Distinguished Visiting Scholar in Irish Studiesat Boston College, and she has held visiting fellowships at Trinity College Dublin, the University of Cambridge, and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. She is currently writing a book provisionally entitled Rapallo: Yeats, Pound, and Late Modernism.

Richard Allen Cave is Emeritus Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has published extensively on aspects of Irish theatre, and edited the manuscripts of The King of the Great Clock Tower and A Full Moon in March (2007). His Collaborations: Ninette de Valois and W. B. Yeats appeared in 2008.

Denis Donoghue is University Professor Emeritus and formerly Henry James Professor of English and American Letters at New York University. Among his many books are William Butler Yeats (1971), his edition of W. B. Yeats, Memoirs Autobiography: First Draft (1971), Thieves of Fire: The Promethean Imagination (The T. S. Eliot Lectures at the University of Kent at Canterbury, 1974), Ferocious Alphabets (1981), The Arts without Mystery (The Reith Lectures, BBC, 1982; 1983), We Irish: Essays on Irish Literature and Society (1988), Warrenpoint (1994), Being Modern Together (1991), Walter Pater: Lover of Strange Souls (1995), Adam’s Curse: Reflections on Literature and Religion (2001), On Eloquence (2010), and Metaphor (2014). He is currently writing a book on T. S. Eliot.

Anita Feldman is a writer, editor, and lecturer at New York University, where she taught writing and literature for twenty-six years. She has also been a guest lecturer on Noh drama at Fordham University. Before that, she was based in Tokyo for almost six years, as an editor for an English-language publisher, an art columnist for the English-language edition of the Mainichi newspaper, and a Tokyo correspondent for the American magazine Art News. She is currently working on a book of essays about Yeats’s plays.

R. A. Gilbert is the author and editor of twelve books, and many contributions to books and periodicals, on the Golden Dawn and its members. Among the most recent of these are his edition of The House of the Hidden Light, by Arthur Machen & A. E. Waite (2003) and a new collection of papers by Westcott: A Magus Among the Adepts. Essays and Addresses by William Wynn Westcott (2012). One major earlier title, The Golden Dawn Companion (1986), is currently being revised for a new edition. Dr Gilbert is now the editor of The Christian Parapsychologist, and has been a long-term contributor of scholarly articles on archives of occult materials to Yeats Annuals.

Warwick Gould FRSL, FRSA, FEAis Emeritus Professor of English Literature in the University of London, and Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of English Studies (in the School of Advanced Study), of which he was Founder-Director 1999–2013. He is co-author of Joachim of Fiore and the Myth of the Eternal Evangel in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1988, rev. 2001), and co-editor of The Secret Rose, Stories by W. B. Yeats: A Variorum Edition (1981, rev. 1992), The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, Volume II, 1896–1900 (1997), and Mythologies (2005). He has edited Yeats Annual for thirty years.

John Kelly is an Emeritus Research Fellow at St John’s College, Oxford, and the Donald Keough Professor in Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He taught English and Irish Literature at Oxford University from 1976 to 2009, and has written extensively on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. He is General Editor of The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, Vol. 4 to which was awarded the Cohen Prize by the Modern Languages Association. His co-edition, with Ronald Schuchard, of Vol. 5 will be out in 2018. He has also edited and introduced a 12-volume series of Irish fiction, poetry, and essays of the nineteenth century, under the title ‘Hibernia: State and Nation’. His W. B. Yeats Chronology appeared in 2003.

Grevel Lindop was formerly Professor of Romantic and Early Victorian Studies at the University of Manchester, and is now an independent writer and researcher. He was General Editor of The Works of Thomas De Quincey (21 vols., 2000–2003), and author of The Opium-Eater: A Life of Thomas De Quincey; A Literary Guide to the Lake District; Charles Williams: The Third Inkling; and seven collections of poems, most recently Luna Park. He is a Fellow of the Wordsworth Trust, and Academic Director of the Temenos Academy, founded by Kathleen Raine.

Stoddard Martin is a writer, lecturer, and publisher. His books include Wagner to the Waste Land, Orthodox Heresy and The Great Expatriate Writers, published by Macmillan. He edited anthologies of Byron, Nietzsche, and D. H. Lawrence in the Duckworth ‘Sayings of’ series, which he helped to devise, and has contributed chapters to many other anthologies, including on George Moore and Ezra Pound. He has taught at Harvard, Oxford, Łódź and Warsaw universities and was for many years an associate fellow of the Institute of English Studies, University of London. He writes short fiction under the name Chip Martin.

Emilie Morin is at the University of York, where she teaches modern British and Irish literature, theatre history, European modernism and the avant-garde. She has a particular interest in the history of radio broadcasting. Her books include Beckett’s Political Imagination (2017) and Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Irishness (2009), and the edited collections Theatre and Human Rights after 1945: Things Unspeakable (2015) and Theatre and Ghosts: Materiality, Performance and Modernity (2014), co-edited with Mary Luckhurst.

William O’Donnell is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Memphis. He edited Yeats’s unfinished novel The Speckled Bird (1974, 1977, and 2003), Prefaces and Introductions (1989), Later Essays (which included On the Boiler) (1994), Autobiographies (co-editor, 1999), and Responsibilities: Manuscript Materials (2003). He is author of A Guide to the Prose Fiction to W. B. Yeats (1983) and The Poetry of William Butler Yeats: An Introduction (1986). He has compiled a catalogue raisonné of the art that Yeats owned.

Catherine E. Paul is Professor Emerita at Clemson University. She is author of Poetry in the Museums of Modernism: Yeats, Pound, Moore, Stein (2002) and Fascist Directive: Ezra Pound and Italian Cultural Nationalism (2016). With Margaret Mills Harper, she edited W. B. Yeats’s A Vision: The Original 1925 Version (2008) and A Vision: The Revised 1937 Version (2015), both for Scribner’s Collected Works Series. She presently works as a textile artist at the Greenville Center for Creative Arts in South Carolina.

James Pethica teaches at Williams College, Massachusetts. He has published editions of Lady Gregory’s Diaries 1892–1902 (1996), and Last Poems: Manuscript Materials in the Cornell Yeats series (1997). His Lady Gregory’s Early Irish Writings, 1883–1893,the 16th vol. in The Collected Works of Lady Gregory (gen. editor and publisher, Colin Smythe) including ‘An Emigrant’s Note Book’, the Angus Grey Stories, and ‘A Phantom’s Pilgrimage’, will be out this year. He is currently working on the authorized biography of Lady Gregory.

Hannah Sullivan is an Associate Professor of English at New College, Oxford. Her first book, The Work of Revision (2013), was a comparative study of modernist writers’ practices of writing and redrafting, with a particular focus on the use of typescript. She was awarded a Leverhulme Prize in 2013 to write a book on the theory, polemic, and practice of free verse from Wordsworth to the present. In fact, as this article on Yeats (written at the beginning of research for the book) begins to suggest, the equation between freedom and prosodic irregularity is not always as simple as it may seem. Her debut poetry collection, Three Poems, will be published by Faber & Faber in 2018.

Deirdre Toomey is editor of Yeats and Women: Yeats Annual No. 9 (1991), revised and augmented as Yeats and Women (1997). She is co-editor of The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, Volume II, 1896–1900 (1997) and Mythologies (2005). She is working with Warwick Gould on a complete revision of A. Norman Jeffares’s A New Commentary on the Poems of Yeats and is Research Editor of Yeats Annual.

Stanley van der Ziel lectures in British and Irish literature at Maynooth University. His work on modern and contemporary Irish literature has been published in various books and journals. He is the author of John McGahern and the Imagination of Tradition (2016), and the editor of two of McGahern’s works—Love of the World: Essays (2009) and The Rockingham Shoot and Other Dramatic Writings (2018), both published by Faber & Faber.

Introduction

© Warwick Gould, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0135.01

‘THE POETRY OF THE THING OUTLIVED’1

There were two ‘Yeats events’ of 2017. The first took place on 27thSeptember at Sotheby’s, London, where the sale of Yeats: The Family Collection offered the relics of three generations of artistic lives, and represented the Aesthetic equivalent of an Irish country-house sale. This then was followed—a surprise to some—by the auction of a further 253 items at Fonsie Mealy’s in Castlecomer, Co. Kilkenny, on 14 November 2017.2 These sales were a moment in the history of Yeats as defining in its way as his 150thanniversary in 2015. Involved as I was in the preparation of the first sale, I offer some thoughts arising from these events before a brief resumé of the principal essays in this volume.

An ordinary family snapshot of Thoor Ballylee, showing the tower as viewed from the cabbage patch over the road, offers a small example of the kinds of research possibilities opened by the objects released in the Yeats Family Sales.

Plate 1. Yeats family snapshot c. 1927, of Thoor Ballylee and its cottages, taken from the ‘acre of stony ground’ or cabbage patch over the road. Image courtesy Private Collection London.

Thoor Ballylee, a monumental sixteenth-century fortified tower-house, was finally purchased, as James Pethica details in his essay in this volume (see below, 213-68), in May 1916. It had been coveted by Yeats since the 1890s and probably since 1896, and it became a public monument from 14 February 1928, the publication day for The Tower,with Yeats’s new personal seal upon its top board. ‘Blood and the Moon’, written in August 1927 and ‘declar[ing] this tower … my symbol’ (VP 480) was then published in The Exile in the spring of 1928.

Thomas Sturge Moore’s famous cover design was drawn not from the snapshot sent by Yeats which survives in the Sturge Moore collection at the Senate House Library, but from this family snapshot offered at the Sotheby’s sale as part of lot 82, a dealer’s lot with an estimate of £200–300 which fetched £550.3 Sturge Moore’s imposed view puts the arches of the bridge below of the tower and cottages, almost as if the tower and cottages had been built upon it: he ‘needed to “move” the bridge (substituting it for the garden wall) in order to have the tower reflected on the surface of the flowing river’.4 Impossible view as it is, it stamped Yeats’s symbol into the public mind and quite displaced all previous rose symbols, including those Sturge Moore’s own designs for Yeats’s books.

Plates 2–3. Plate 2 is a cropped detail of Plate 1 approximating the ‘view’ of the tower and cottages depicted in Plate 3, a detail of Thomas Sturge Moore’s top board design for The Tower (1928). Images courtesy Private Collection London.

But back in the 1920s, Thoor Ballylee had rather quickly lost its markedly compromised charms for the Yeats family as a summer home and writing retreat, and for various practical reasons. Its abandonment had been foreseen as early as 22 December 1921:

I am in deep gloom about Ireland … I see no hope of escape from bitterness …. When men are very bitter, death & ruin draw them on as a rabit is supposed to be drawn on by the dancing of the fox …. all may be blood & misery. If that comes we may abandon Ballylee to the owls and the rats & England too (where passion will rise & I shall find myself with no answer), & live in some far land. Should England & Ireland be divided beyond all hope of remedy, what else could one do for the childrens sake, or ones own work (CL InteLex 4039).

Oliver St. John Gogarty warned him that

To stones trust not your monument

To make a living fame endure.

Who built Dun Aengus Battlement?

O’Flaherty is forgotten in Auchnanure.5

And he who told how Troy was sacked

And what men clipt the lovely Burd,

Had seven Mayors to swear, in fact,

Their towns first heard his babbling word.6

By 26 August 1927 Yeats had left Ballylee for the last time, before going to Algeciras in November to recover from pneumonia. A year later, the workload in the Seanad and in Dublin public life had become crushing and Yeats’s health was failing.

Although written in 1918, ‘To be carved on a Stone at Thoor Ballylee’, was not erected as a tablet until 1948. Its ‘powerful rhyme’ looked set to outlive the monument itself as the tower, vandalised, again fell into ruin.7 Some few moveable items of furniture had found their way back to Dublin, and, by the time they appeared in Yeats: The Family Collection sale at Sotheby’s, London, on 27 September 2017, they had acquired relic status.8

Very few ‘dear perpetual’ places can be securely endowed against time and taxes. While Henry James’s Spencer Brydon still finds ‘ineffaceable life’ when he revisits his family’s home on ‘The Jolly Corner’ in New York after thirty-three years abroad,9 it is a truism of the sale rooms that there eventually comes a time when a family outlives the Lares et Penates of its forebears. Inevitably, disencumberment ensues.

Yeats: The Family Collection’ was a sale carefully planned by the Yeats family over a long period with the auction house, the National Library and other state depositories in Ireland. In that preparation, as became publicly apparent both before and after the sale, lay in fact the culmination of nearly 80 years of extraordinary generosity by Mrs Yeats and her descendants. Jack B. and Cottie Yeats remained childless, so too did the ‘weird sisters’ of the Dun Emer and Cuala Presses Susan Mary (Lily) and Elizabeth Corbet (Lollie) Yeats. So, too, was W. B. Yeats’s daughter, Anne. The inherited, the created, the acquired—some of it with W. B. Yeats’s Nobel Prize money—all that had not already gone to archives and galleries all around the world, came to rest in Cliff House, Dalkey, the family home of Michael and Gráinne Yeats and their children.

That family’s generosity to the State has been profound: its proud record is summarized in the series of press releases from the National Library of Ireland, not only announcing the acquisition by the Library of the Yeats-Joyce and Yeats-George Yeats correspondences, but also reviewing the history of some €8.5 million worth of gifts from the family since 1939 to that institution alone.10

When I first visited Cliff House and Anne Yeats’s nearby house ‘Avalon’ as a postgraduate in 1970, I did not know that I sat on one of Yeats’s dining chairs, lunching en famille at ‘Yeats’s dining table’, purchased with his Nobel Prize money (Lots 102, 103, estimates and hammer prices below). Sunk into a too comfortable chair in the living room, I found my eyes continually drawn from my study of Yeats’s manuscripts and marked proofs by the paintings, drawings, even the furniture. I think particularly of the John Butler Yeats self-portrait, unfinished, relayered and encrusted with impasto over 11 years as he sought to prolong his life in New York to avoid returning to his family in Dublin (Lot 64, est. £30,000-£50,000; fetched £70,000). Or of a portrait of William Butler Yeats at 22 by his father (not in this sale) of the poet in his own poem, as his own mad ‘King Goll’, hitherto known to me only as a steel engraving in The Leisure Hour of September 1887, in which he is depicted ‘tearing the strings out [of] a harp, being insane with youth, but looking very desirable—alas no woman noticed it at the time—with dreamy eyes & a great mass of black hair. It hangs in our drawing room now a pathetic memory of a really dreadful time’: so Yeats recalled for Olivia Shakespear in 1924. ‘I write for boys & girls of twenty for I am always thinking of myself at that age’ (CL InteLex 4556). Working among Yeats’s own books at Anne Yeats’s nearby ‘Avalon’, my eyes were drawn to Yeats’s gilded Moorish (actually a Burmese chest, now in the National Gallery of Ireland) wedding-chest in which, as he had written, he had kept his ‘barbarous words’ (Myth 366; CW5 32).

What George, Michael, Anne Yeats and Michael’s children gave to Irish state institutions over the years were objects easily identifies as research materials—books, manuscripts, letters, sketches, and paintings. What had hitherto been perhaps unforeseen is the new research interests in domestic interiors, and of the relic-making processes of writing and artistic creation. Sotheby’s exploited the potential of this in their Dublin and London displays of what was to be offered, and the web advertising for the sale as well as the catalogue captured well their co-location of objects around Yeats’ desk and writing chair—desk candlesticks, letters, a large silver inkwell, the black-japanned deed box with his name upon it.

Plate 4. Yeats family heirlooms as clustered by Sotheby’s, London, for the frontispiece of their Yeats: The Family Collection,the catalogue accompanying the sale of that name on 27 September 2017. Image courtesy Philip Errington, and © Sotheby’s, New Bond St., London, all rights reserved.

The deed box is instructive for historians of price. On 23 July 1987, Sotheby’s sold a vast collection of such writers’ deed boxes from A. P. Watt & Co., advertising them at prices of little more than £100 each (lots 202–224 in that sale). Yeats’s was not among them, presumably having been returned to the family at some point. It turned up as lot 983 in the current sale, with an ambitious estimate of £2,000–3,000. It fetched £12,000.

To judge only by observation of paddle numbers as announced by the auctioneer at the sale, three separate buyers divided between them a multitude of lots. The prodigious first single buyer appears to have purchased—in the case of the first two items below against a determined and well-publicized attempt by Poetry Ireland—

Yeats’s oak writing bureau (Lot 89, estimate £20,000-£30,000, hammer price £150,000)Yeats’s elm desk chair (Lot 87, est. £3,000-£5,000, hammer price £26,000)John Butler Yeats, Four Sketchbooks, c. 1892–1904 (Lot 50, est. £6000-£8000, hammer price £11,000)Yeats Family Scrapbook (Lot 9, est. £4,000-£6,000, hammer price £10,500)Jack B. Yeats’s Palette (Lot 212, est. £200-£300, hammer price £7,500)John Butler Yeats’s 1921 pencilled Self-Portrait (Lot 2, est. £3000-£5,000, hammer price £6500)John Butler Yeats, Four Sketchbooks, New York, 1908–1913 (Lot 53, est. £6,000-£8,000, hammer price £6,500)John Butler Yeats, watercolour 1883, ‘Three Girls Listening to Music’ (Lot 34, est. £6,000-£8,000, hammer price £6,000)Eight photograph albums, assembled and captioned by Lily and Lolly Yeats, early 20th C. (Lot 139, est. £5,000-£7,000, hammer price £5,000)John Butler Yeats, Sketch of Jack B. Yeats, 1899, signed by sitter and artist (Lot 173, est. £3,000-£5,000, hammer price £5,000)John Butler Yeats, Pencil sketch of his wife, Mrs Susan Yeats (Lot 30, est. £2,000-£3,000, hammer price £3,800)A pair of Edwardian rosewood brushes with monogram of William Butler Yeats, early 20th C. (Lot 91, est. £800-£1,200, hammer price £3,500)John Butler Yeats, three sketches of Ladies (Lot 51, one possibly Lily Yeats, writing, one dated Sept 4th 1898, the others ‘Cousin? Laura Yeats’ and ‘Marian Orr March 20th 1901’ (Lot 51, est. £3,000-£5,000, hammer price £2,800)John Butler Yeats, Three Sketches of Women one possibly Mary Walker, one possibly Jenny Mitchell (Lot 52 est. £3,000-£5,000, hammer price £2,800)Two pairs of repoussé brass Scandinavian candlesticks, 19th C. (Lot 118, est. £1,200-£1,800, hammer price £2,200)John Butler Yeats, pencilled Portrait of Elizabeth Corbet, ‘Lolly’ Yeats, signed and dated, ‘Oct. 6 1898’ (Lot 134, est. £2,000-£3,000, hammer price £2,000)Collection of eight professional portrait photographs (Alice Boughton, 1904; ‘Vaughan’ 1890s; Elliot & Fry (?1930s); Howard; W. Bates of Chertsey etc.), of Jack B. Yeats (Lot 208, est. £1,500-£2,000, hammer price £2,000)Arnold Genthe, three photographic portraits of W. B. Yeats, 1914 (Lot 108, est. £1,500-£2,000, hammer price £1,600)Jack B. Yeats’s collapsible top hat (Lot 209 est. £500-£700, hammer price £1,300) (see above Plate 4)Jack B. Yeats, Three Head Studies, possibly of Jenny Mitchell (Lot 40, est. £1,000-£1,500, hammer price £1,200)Silver Inkwell, William Comyns & Sons, 1903, with ceramic inkpot, probably belonging formerly to Aunt Elizabeth Pollexfen (‘Lolla’. i.e., Mrs Alexander Barrington Orr) (Lot 29, est. £200-£300, hammer price £650) (see above Plate 4)John Butler Yeats, Portrait drawings of Charles Fitzgerald and Fr. Kavanagh (Lot 38, est. £600-£800, hammer price £600).

These hammer figures add up to £262,150, and while a number of these purchases were within range of the estimates, the buyer’s total investment would have been in the region of £314,580 excluding VAT if an overseas buyer. It was rumoured at the sale that the purchaser is to put them on public exhibition, but nothing has yet been confirmed. Another multiple-lot buyer appears to have purchased

The Yeats family dining table, mahogany and boxwood, said to have been bought with the Nobel Prize money (Lot 103, est. £1,500-£2,500, hammer price £8,000)The 17th C. (heavily wormed) ‘Monk’s Chest’, said by family tradition to have been used for ‘storage’ by W. B. Yeats (Lot 88, est. £600–700, hammer price £2,600)A matched set of six late George IV ash spindle back dining chairs, c. 1820, with rush seats (Lot 102, est. £800-£1,200, hammer price £3,800) Four medals and one badge, including Yeats’s Goethe Plakette (Lot 99, est. £500-£700, hammer price £2,600)W. B. Yeats’s card index and ring binder (Lot 92, est. £100-£150, hammer price £2,400)Two Arts and Crafts desk candlesticks in the manner of Benham and Froud, London in brass and copper (Lot 95, est. £400–600, hammer price £1,800) 18 reproductions and prints by Aubrey Beardsley and W. T. Horton (Lot 114, est. £400-£600, hammer price £1,000)A late George IV mahogany armchair (Lot 46, est. £800-£1,200, hammer price £950)A Victorian walnut and velvet aesthetic style rocking chair in the manner of Bruce James Talbert, c. 1890 (Lot 142, est. £500-£700, hammer price £500).

The total hammer price here is £28,550. The candlesticks here listed as lot 95 had been the pair chosen by Sotheby’s to sit on Yeats’s desk for the Dublin and London exhibitions: the added mana-by-association may be gauged by the price of the next item (Lot 96, two brass desk candlesticks, also in the manner of Benham and Froud, also Aesthetic style, est. £200-£300, hammer price £480). I believe similarly enhanced prices were achieved by the display of lot 29, ‘Lolla’ Pollexfen’s inkwell (see above), also placed on W. B. Yeats’s bureau desk in these exhibitions.

A third collector appears to have acquired

John Butler Yeats’s oil Portrait of Elizabeth Corbet (‘Lolly’) Yeats c. 1899 (Lot 138, est. £20,000-£30,000, hammer price £42,000)Jack B. Yeats, Ireland sketchbook, 1909 (Lot 204, est. £10,000-£15,000, hammer price £8,000)John Butler Yeats, Sketches of Family Life (Lot 8, est. £5,000-£7,000, hammer price £7,000)Jack B. Yeats, A collection of early Sketches and Illustrations (Lot 160, est. £8,000-£12,000, hammer-price £7,000)Anne Yeats, ‘Crayfish’, oil on board (Lot 213, est. £1,500-£2,500, hammer price £5,000)John Butler Yeats, three sketchbooks dating from his New York period (Lot 58, est. £5,000-£7,000, hammer price £4,000)Mary Cottenham Yeats, Sketchbook, including portraits of Jack B. Yeats (Lot 177, est. £2,000-£3,000, hammer price £3,200)Mary Cottenham Yeats, Sketchbook of 26 designs and stencils in watercolour (Lot 179, est. £2,000-£3,000, hammer price £3,200)John Butler Yeats, Two Sketches of John O’Leary (Lot 35, est. £1,500-£2,500, hammer price £1,500)Collection of 6 photographic portraits of John Butler Yeats, 1860s to 1900s (Lot 54, est. £1,500-£2,000, hammer price £1,500).

These total £82,400 in hammer prices. Between them, these three buyers paid c. £448,000 (including buyer’s commission but excluding VAT).

An atmosphere of doubt pervaded the saleroom when lot 37, a John Butler Yeats oil ‘thought to be [of] William Morris with a pencil sketch also said’ was offered (Lot 37, est. £4,000-£6,000, hammer price £3,800), but a determined purchaser bought the companion to the oil portrait of Lolly Yeats, that of Susan Mary (‘Lily’) Yeats, 1899 (Lot 137, est. £20,000–£30,000, hammer price £50,000); while notable prices were also paid for:

Lot 79, est. £. 8,000-£12,000, hammer price £90,000, the Antonio Mancini pastel portrait of W. B. Yeats used as the basis for the frontispiece to Vol. V of The Collected Works in Verse and Prose (1908). The buyer, Philip Mould of Philip Mould & Co., London, told me that he thought this possibly a world record price for a modern pastel portrait.Lot 73, est. £8,000-£12,000, hammer price £24,000, a John Butler Yeats oil portrait of W. B. Yeats in a basket chair, reading in the overgrown garden at 3 Blenheim Rd., Bedford Park, London, c. 1888–1889.11Lot 110, est. £2,000-£3,000, hammer price £6,200, a pencil drawing with white highlights of Iseult Gonne by Maud Gonne, c. 1910–1915.

Overall, exceptional prices for a number of compelling paintings such as these helped to compensate for those highest-estimated lots in the sale which ultimately failed to find buyers. Not only were a number of Jack B. Yeats pieces unsold, but the painting which, in many ways had been judged the star item of the sale, a late explosive oil entitled ‘The Runaway Horse’ (Lot 181, est. £150,000–250,000) was unsold at a bid of just £95,000, whereas ‘The Sunset belongs to You’ (lot 205, est. £100,000–£150,000) went for a hammer price of £170,000. The highest estimate of the entire sale was for lot 86 (£250,000-£350,000), 133 autograph letters from W. B. Yeats to Olivia Shakespear, with 37 letters from Shakespear to Yeats, and two letters to her forwarded on to Yeats. That the whole of this correspondence is available in the InteLex online edition and the Shakespear side was edited by John Harwood for Yeats Annual No. 6 may account for the lack of interest from research libraries, and the lot was bought in at £200,000.

Yeats: The Family Sale had been estimated as likely to total c. £2 million, a figure pretty much reached despite the fact that only 87% of lots were sold.

It will be seen that relics of what Seamus Heaney called ‘the place of writing’ bringing writing agency to life were appropriately valued. Yeats’s card index file box, used in the preparation of A Vision,Jack B. Yeats’s palette, and his pencil box, with designs on five surfaces (Lot 166, £3,000-£5,000) went at the high end of the estimate, at £4,800. (By contrast, Lily Yeats’s charming little walnut and maple Davenport (Lot 141, est. £500-£700) was knocked down for only £600.)

Now that the materiality of writing and even of drawing is vanishing, museums of writing seek to preserve not merely Sumerian tablets, ancient manuscripts, and calligraphic tools, but also typewriters and word processors. The objects in this sale preserve something not always found in such museums: particularity of ownership, the perpetually vital ingredient of human agency. A known and valued creator, we say, lived, and worked using or surrounded by these objects. This mana has market value, and is not always effaced when transferred as ‘relic value’ into new ownership. All those years ago in a house full of teenage children I had found myself continually distracted by objects of recognizable associations: now it seems as if once a connexion is recognized between the here and now and the past lives and works of artists and poet, nearly every object becomes charged with potential significance. W. B. Yeats’s two monogrammed brushes (listed above) bring to mind the words ‘Always particular about my clothes’ in a passage of memorably reflective self-criticism in his Pages from a Diary Written in Nineteen Hundred and Thirty (Ex 308).

Plate 5. Antonio Mancini’s 1908 pastel portrait of W. B. Yeats used as the basis for the frontispiece to Vol. V of The Collected Works in Verse and Prose (1908). Image courtesy Philip Errington, and Sotheby’s, New Bond St., London.

Plate 6. John Butler Yeats oil portrait of W. B. Yeats in a basket chair, reading in the overgrown garden at 3 Blenheim Rd., Bedford Park, London, c. 1888–1889. Image courtesy Philip Errington, and Sotheby’s, New Bond St., London.