“Of What is Past, or Passing, or To Come”: Recent Yeats Scholarship

Yeats famously looked both backward and forward from the present, as his celebrated phrase from “Sailing to Byzantium” suggests. It applies well to the five books under review here. These works by Helen Vendler, Nicholas Grene, Ronald Schuchard, Warwick Gould, and the late Richard J. Finneran stand in different ways as major accomplishments by respected senior scholars in the field of modernist scholarship in general and of Yeats studies in particular. We sometimes forget how recent Yeats studies are in the academy. Sixty years ago those pioneers of the first generation of Yeats scholars Richard Ellmann and Thomas Parkinson had to legitimate in their graduate programs (at Yale and Berkeley, respectively) the acceptance of a doctoral dissertation on so recent a writer as Yeats. Yet in just over twenty years after their resultant breakthrough books, the critical-biographical Yeats: The Man and the Masks (1948) and more textually-based W. B. Yeats, Self-Critic: A Study of His Early Verse (1951), Yeats would already come under fire from poststructuralist and then cultural critics as politically and sexually retrograde. The books discussed here exemplify the impressive textual, critical, and historical scholarship of the generation that came after Ellmann and Parkinson, and therein lies both their glory and their limit. On the one hand, that they bring such historical, biographical, critical, and textual approaches to disparate culminations makes them worth the attention of any student of modernist poetry and, particularly with Finneran’s edition, opens new avenues for younger scholars and graduate students to explore. On the other hand, methodologically the works display an indifference to changes in literary study for the past three decades that leaves plenty of territory for future scholars to investigate.

Richard Finneran’s prize-winning edition of W. B. Yeats’s The Tower (1928): Manuscript Materials (brought to successful conclusion by Jared Curtis and Ann Saddlemyer after Finneran’s untimely death) deserves applause both for its textual accomplishment and for its creation of avenues for future work. The final volume to be published in the poetry series of the Cornell Yeats project (there is a separate, ongoing one for the plays as well), its 670 pages display both photo-facsimiles and facing typographic transcription of all known surviving manuscript drafts of the poems in that major modernist volume, including such major and influential works as “Sailing to Byzantium,” “The Tower,” “Meditations in Time of Civil War,” “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” “Leda and the Swan,” and “Among School Children,” among others. Collecting them was difficult, especially in the pre-internet age of card catalogues, handwritten lists, and often expensive travel to collections. Most of them are now in the great Yeats collection of the National Library of Ireland, much of it formerly in Yeats’s son Michael’s private collection at Cliff House in Dalkey outside Dublin, where Finneran and I among others first consulted them. More documents come from repositories like the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, the Bodleian at Oxford, the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory, and the Beinecke at Yale. Their publication here completes the goal of the Cornell Yeats poetry series to make all known surviving manuscripts of Yeats’s poetry available to libraries and scholars throughout the country and the world. That opens a range of possibilities for textual, critical, and historical investigation to researchers not only...