Abstract
The most controversial aspect of the revised edition of The Poems has been, and perhaps always will be, the matter of the order of the poems. That is, should the poems be presented in the quasi-chronological scheme of the 1932 proofs for the Edition de Luxe, or in the two-part division of “Lyrical” and “Narrative and Dramatic” of the 1933 Collected Poems? Essentially, those who favour the quasi-chronological arrangement argue that since the Collected Poems was intended for the “ordinary reader”, Yeats did not hesitate to publish it in an inferior format, monetary reward being his primary concern.1 The Edition de Luxe, on the other hand, was designed as a “canonical edition”, and thus Yeats reserved the proper order for its exclusive use. As for the Scribner Edition, well, that was only for “American collectors”, and who cared about those types anyway? In short, to use the elegant phrasing of the co-champion of the Edition de Luxeites, the Collected Poems was a “pot-boiler”,2 the true Sacred Book being the collaborative edition prepared by Mrs. Yeats and Thomas Mark, Poems (1949).
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Notes
This view was first argued by A. Norman Jeffares in A New Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1984) pp. vii–x. Jeffares drew both on his own research, including conversations with Mrs. Yeats, and correspondence with Warwick Gould. Gould then presented this position in a review in The Times Literary Supplement, 29 June 1984, pp. 731–33, though one must wonder about his own sense of chronology when he writes that Jeffares “accepts my view” (p. 731). Several other reviewers also agreed with Jeffares, though none offered any significant evidence. For fuller citation than will be offered in this chapter of the errors and misstatements by Jeffares and Gould, see Richard J. Finneran, “The Order of Yeats’s Poems”, Irish University Review, 14, no. 2 (Autumn 1984) 165–76.
This letter is also included in Letters to W. B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran, George Mills Harper, and William M. Murphy (London: Macmillan, 1977) p. 552.
Hugh Kenner, “The Sacred Book of the Arts”, Irish Writing, 31 (Summer 1955) 32.
Mrs. Yeats sent the American publishers “a copy of the New York 1938 text with thirty-eight corrections marked in her hand”. Connie K. Hood, “The Remaking of A Vision”, Yeats, 1 (1983) 66.
Edward Callan has noted that “In New York during November 1935 the average book sold for three dollars or less; and for seventy dollars the Cunard Line was offering a six-day luxury cruise to Nassau.” Yeats on Yeats: The Last Introductions and the “Dublin” Edition, New Yeats Papers 20 (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1981) pp. 13–14. Likewise, the dust-jacket of the British edition of Last Poems & Plays (1940) lists twenty-five Yeats volumes, with prices ranging from 1 shilling to 12s 6d., the latter for the “Ecrasé Morocco” edition of the Collected Poems.
Jerome J. McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) pp. 51, 75.
Hershel Parker, Flawed Texts and Literary Icons: Literary Authority in American Fiction (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1984) p. ix.
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© 1990 Richard J. Finneran
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Finneran, R.J. (1990). The Order of the Poems. In: Editing Yeats’s Poems. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11020-9_8
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