Reviews

Abstract

The collecting, arranging, editing and publication of Yeats’s work had become a very complicated affair by the early thirties, when the poet himself was making his final attempt to set it all in order in a scrupulously revised, handsomely produced, collected edition. In this effort Yeats was assisted chiefly by Thomas Mark, who was the editor responsible for his work at Macmillan, and by Mrs Yeats. The preparations for an Edition de Ijixe (hereafter EdL) were thwarted by the economic conditions of the times, interrupted by Yeats’s death and terminated by the outbreak of the Second World War; but the editorial work did not altogether go to waste. One of its products was the Collected Poems of 1933 (hereafter CP33 and meaning always the English edition), which was conceived as a kind of stop-gap substitute for the first volume of the postponed, and ultimately abandoned, EdL. Another was the two-volume edition of Poems published in 1949 (hereafter designated P49), which became known as the “Definitive Edition”, chiefly because it was based on the proofs that Yeats had corrected for the aborted EdL in 1932.