The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, volume IV: Early Essays (review)

The essays included in this volume are not new to readers of Yeats, as they have long been available in the paperback Essays and Introductions (1961). Included are such familiar texts as "What Is 'Popular Poetry'?", "Magic", "The Symbolism of Poetry", "The Celtic Element in Literature", "Certain Noble Plays of Japan", "Poetry and Tradition" and "J. M. Synge and the Ireland of his Time". Yeats's essays treat the importance of the arts to Ireland, relations between music and speech, the importance of ancient traditions to modern writing, the role of rhythm in poetry, his relation to Pre-Raphaelite painters and Irish nationalists, what the modern theatre has to learn from Japanese tradition, along with the writings of Edmund Spenser, William Morris, William Shakespeare, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. These essays appeared in Ideas of Good and Evil (1903) and The Cutting of an Agate (first published in 1912 and revised in 1919) and constitute those short prose works that Yeats selected to preserve from his first fifty years. These texts, their ideas, their connections to Yeats's poems—these things are not new. That does not, however, mean that we do not need this new volume, Early Essays. What the present edition offers is not new material by Yeats, but a new way into familiar texts.

Early Essays is a part of the fourteen-volume Collected Works of W. B. Yeats series, published by Scribner and Palgrave Macmillan, and both editors, George Bornstein and the late Richard J. Finneran, have produced esteemed scholarship on Yeats and served as series editors for this collection. This series, which began publication in the 1980s, has changed mildly in accordance with shifts in editorial theory, but it remains true to its mission to present readers with clear texts and apparatus in volumes that balance between full scholarly texts and reprint editions common to commercial houses. The base-text for this edition is Essays (1924), which contains the last edition of The Cutting of an Agate and Ideas of Good and Evil published in Yeats's lifetime and which, when in January 1937 he prepared contents for the never published Scribner edition of his works, he specified should be the basis of Essays.

Through its apparatus, Early Essays allows other readings than the principle of final and expressed authorial intention requires. The editors' introduction traces the publication history and reception of Ideas of Good and Evil, The Collected Works in Verse and Prose (1908), The Cutting of an Agate, and Essays. Extending that history, it replays the history of Yeats's planning for the Edition de Luxe (or Coole Edition) and the Scribner Edition, showing Yeats's plans for these essays there. The introduction addresses posthumous publications of these essays in the abandoned Essays (1949) and then in Essays and Introductions, widely available but corrected and "improved" by hands other than Yeats's. The introduction gestures also to the publication of many of these essays in periodicals or, more occasionally, as introductions to books (the editors' notes trace the publication history of each essay). Nine appendices reproduce a chronological list of essays by date of first publication; omitted sections from various essays; and the full text of "The Pathway", first published in The Speaker in 1900 as "The Way of Wisdom", intended for inclusion in Ideas of Good and Evil as of 1902 but not published in the finished volume of 1903. Yeats revised and retitled the essay for inclusion in the eighth volume of Collected Works, but then did not include it in The Cutting of an Agate or republish it again. Also included are prefaces from the 1912 and 1919 editions of The Cutting of an Agate, Yeats's dedication of Essays (1924), and the preface to J. M. Synge and the Ireland of His Time (1911).

This edition notably brings visual materials to readers, highlighting the material...