Abstract
Yeats was in London from “about Oct 8” 1932 until he left for his American lecture tour on 21 October (L 802). As we have noted, he had with him a complete set of corrected page proofs for the Edition de Luxe Poems. I conjecture that Yeats met with Macmillan on 19 or 20 October. Among other things, he would have been seeking assurances that there would be no further delays in publishing the Edition de Luxe and that it would indeed appear in the spring of 1933, as the publishers has suggested to him in a letter of 11 August 1932 (BL 55731/405-07). When Macmillan indicated that they were not prepared to proceed with the Edition de Luxe, it seems that Yeats made a counterproposal: why not go ahead and publish Poems at once in a trade edition, a Collected Poems? By time the Edition de Luxe was ready to go forward, Yeats would surely have further poems to add to the volume, and thus the publisher’s desire for previously unpublished material in the Edition would be satisfied. Moreover, the agreement with Ernest Benn was to expire in May 1933 (BL 54902/4), and no original collection of Yeats’s poems had been published in England since The Tower (1928). Yeats must have been convincing, as on 20 October 1932 Macmillan wrote to Watt about “a new proposal which Yeats has made to me” (BL 55733/424). The wonder is that the publishers hadn’t thought of the idea first.
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Notes
The errata slip is not noted in Wade, Bibliography, pp. 172–73, and VP treats the misprints as variants (530, 832). I came across the errata slip in James Stephens’ copy of The Winding Stair and Other Poems and mentioned it in Richard J. Finneran, The Olympian and the Leprechaun: W. B. Yeats and James Stephens, New Yeats Papers 16 (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1978) p. 30.
Richard Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats, 2nd edn (London: Faber, 1964) p. 292.
See Louise Morgan, Writers at Work (London: Chatto and Windus, 1931) p. 9. Previous commentators seem not to have noticed the remark. Thomas Parkinson’s W. B. Yeats: The Later Poetry (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1964) pp. 211–16 offers a valuable discussion of the manuscripts. The readings by John Unterecker in A Reader’s Guide to William Butler Yeats (New York: Noonday Press, 1959) pp. 227–28, and by Harold Bloom in Yeats (New York: Oxford University Press) p. 401, are similar but, I think, misguided. My interpretation follows in some respects Laurence Perrine, “Yeats’s ‘Crazy Jane and Jack the Journeyman’”, CEA Critic, 34, no. 3 (March 1972) 22–23.
Jon Stallworthy, Between the Lines: Yeats’s Poetry in the Making (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963) p. 12. (Stallworthy took notes on the letter while it was still in Mark’s possession.) In his reply of 12 September 1932, Mark noted that “It is very good of you to offer me a free hand with the punctuation. I was afraid of seeming fussy or pedantic, for one is always drawn on further than one expected in the attempt to make an edition of this kind harmonious in its smaller details.” Letters to W. B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran, George Mills Harper, and William M. Murphy (London: Macmillan, 1977) pp. 543–44.
Most previous critics have overstated Yeats’s disdain for punctuation. Stallworthy, for example, uses as evidence a letter from Yeats to Robert Bridges: “I do not understand stops. I write my work so completely for the ear that I feel helpless when I have to measure pauses by stops & commas” (Between the Lines, p. 12). But the text in question was an anthology reprinting, and to at least some extent Yeats was being deferential to the older poet. For the context of Yeats’s remark, see The Correspondence of Robert Bridges and W. B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran (London: Macmillan, 1977) pp. 34–37. Those who argue that Yeats was unconcerned with punctuation might also consider a statement in a letter to Macmillan on 10 September 1927: “I return cont’d overleaf the proof of the poem, which is now correct. Through vacillation over the punctuation of the first stanza I have made a blotted proof but I think it is clear” (BL 55003/100). The lyric in question was “Sailing to Byzantium”. One of the few to defend Yeats’s punctuation was Curtis Bradford, presenting his position both in a review of VP in Sewanee Review, 68, no. 4 (Autumn 1958) 668–74, esp. pp. 673–74; and in his Yeats at Work (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965) pp. 13–14. Bradford cogently argued that “the long line of editors and copy editors who added punctuation to Yeats’s own versions of his poems have done us no favor” (Yeats at Work, p. 393, n. 1).
Daniel A. Harris, Yeats: Coole Park & Ballylee (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974) p. 220.
See Richard J. Finneran, “A Note on the Scribner Archive at the Humanities Research Center”, Yeats, 2 (1984) 227–32. A manuscript draft of the revision is found in NLI 30,409.
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© 1990 Richard J. Finneran
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Finneran, R.J. (1990). The Winding Stair and Other Poems and The Collected Poems. In: Editing Yeats’s Poems. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11020-9_3
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