This volume presents the surviving manuscripts, typescripts, and early printed texts for all of the poems W. B. Yeats included at one time or another in two remarkably significant and protean collections: In the Seven Woods, first published in 1903, and The Green Helmet and Other Poems, first published in 1910. It also documents the extant early record for seven poems Yeats wrote between 1899 and 1914 but either never published or never attached to one of his plays or collections of poems.

During this crucial period in his career, Yeats transformed himself from a...

Words upon the Window Pane, first staged in 1930, is W. B. Yeats's most powerful and brilliant dramatic exploration of the occult, in which he had a lifelong interest, and an affirmation of Anglo-Irish Protestant cultural ascendancy. Written at Lady Gregory's Coole Park estate, it features a seance in which Jonathan Swift's voice is projected through a medium. Like Yeats, Swift was both politician and poet, and taking Swift as his subject allowed Yeats to cloak a political message under personal character.

Quite probably based on an obscure one-act play called Swift and...

The Land of Heart's Desire, staged at the Avenue Theatre in London in 1894, marks W. B. Yeats's first use of Irish folklore in a play produced in the commercial theater, with important consequences for his career as a dramatist. This book includes transcriptions and photographs of the surviving holograph manuscripts of the play, reproductions of Yeats's own notes and revisions, and other materials related to stage productions and the resulting changes he made to the text.

After Maud Gonne refused his offer of marriage in the summer of 1893, Yeats coped with his...