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  • The Manuscripts of Yeats's The Tower
  • K.P.S. Jochum
W. B. Yeats . The Tower (1928): Manuscript Materials. Richard J. Finneran with Jared Curtis and Ann Saddlemyer, eds. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007. liii + 670 pp. $99.95

Upon publication in February 1928, W. B. Yeats's The Tower attracted more than thirty reviews, many of them praising the poems both for what they had to say and how they said it. Austin Clarke, writing anonymously in the TLS (1 March 1928), admired their "imaginative and prosodic beauty that brings one the pure and impersonal joy of art." And Virginia Woolf, also reviewing anonymously, noted: "Mr. [End Page 97] Yeats has never written more exactly and more passionately" (Nation & Athenaeum, 21 April 1928). Nevertheless, there were some dissenting voices: the American critic Theodore Spencer, although alive to the many fine poems in the collection, deplored the frequent inconclusive intrusions of the philosophy of A Vision and what he considered to be the triviality of the concluding lines of "Sailing to Byzantium" (New Republic, 10 October 1928).

As this edition in the Cornell Yeats series makes abundantly clear, Yeats worked hard and long on the individual poems. "The New Faces" was written as early as 1912. Most poems had a complicated gestation; some examples will show this and, incidentally, hint at the benefits a reader might derive from studying the material when engaged in the search for the meaning of a poem. "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen" dates from 1921, was published in two periodicals in the same year as "Thoughts upon the Present State of the World," and found its final form seven years later. The title change is significant: Yeats sharpened the Irish focus by alluding to the Anglo-Irish War of 1919–1921. Except for the title, the published versions were subjected to only a few revisions. But studying the manuscript materials presents a different picture. They are spread over fifty-eight pages, more than in any other poem except "The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid" (seventy-eight pages). "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen" comes in three sets of manuscripts, two typescripts, and one set of page proofs. The manuscript versions are by no means a straightforward affair. In the third set, for instance, Yeats made four different attempts to get the section beginning "We too had many pretty toys" right. Its near-final shape was achieved only in the second typescript. Generally, however, the drafts are relatively close to the finished product in form and content.

This is quite different with "Sailing to Byzantium." The first draft bears almost no resemblance to the poem as we know it. Only very few of the some 170 lines of manuscript are retained, more or less verbatim, until the end of the composition process: "This [later: That] is no country for old men," "fastened to a dying animal," "of hammered gold & gold enamelling." The famous last line ("Of what is past, or passing, or to come") appears, without preparation, in the middle of the tenth leaf, as a kind of inspired afterthought. On the other hand, it took Yeats several revisions to get rid of superfluous, indeed falsifying, details, such as the "dark skinned mariners" or "sun-brown pleasant mariners" who steer the ship towards Byzantium. An imaginary sea voyage needs no conventional crew. [End Page 98]

Compared to "Sailing to Byzantium," the evolution of "Leda and the Swan" is a straightforward process, despite several false starts, commented upon in Finneran's introduction. The crucial question with which the poem ends is there right from the start, but acquires its question mark only in the final version. An important insight to be gained from studying the drafts concerns the poem's title. When he began sketching out the poem Yeats chose "Annunciation," but soon replaced it with "Leda and the Swan," obviously with the intention of suppressing the Christian association.

The drafts of "Among School Children" stand apart from those of the other poems in that Yeats begins with a "Topic for poem," including a revealing reminder: "Bring in the old thought that life prepares for what never happens." Which prompts the question whether and how the old thought is indeed...

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