Yeats Exegesis Catalogued

BOOK REVIEWS most of which were found in obvious places like the London Mercury and the Times Literary Supplement but some (so diligent was the search) in out of the way publications like Si. Bartholomew's Hospital Journal and the Pelican Record. The annotation of this material is concise and objective, and even a quick reading of it will give an accurate picture of the rise and subsequent decline in Bridges's reputation. It was Hamilton's editorial policy not to include reviews of secondary material such as reviews of books about Bridges. If he had attempted to include all this material, the project would have been enormous. However , I wish he had chosen to include, selectively, citations of a few review essays which appeared in the last decade and a half, articles by Roy Fuller, Ashley Brown and others. I believe they would have shown a renewed interest in this fine formalist poet coincident with the formalist movement among our younger poets writing in the 1980s. In a project of this intricacy and magnitude a few minor errors and typos are inevitable. The following names are misspelled: Sir Israel Gollancz (p. 57 and index); Nicolas Barker (pp. 65, 198, 200), George Saintsbury (p. 88); Harry Wooldridge (p. 134); George L. McKay (p. 151); and Donald E. Stanford (p. 211). The entry citing the publication of the Bridges-Trevelyn correspondence about New Verse and The Testament of Beauty on page 63, item 1957.2, is troublesome. It is identical with item 1955.1 on pages 62-63 except for the date and the spelling of Mill House Press, so it must be a reprint but the fact is not indicated. Also it should be noted that Lord David Cecil's selection of Bridges's poems published by Faber & Faber in 1987 was omitted. Aside from these minor matters (which can easily be corrected in a revised edition), Hamilton's bibliography is an accurate, substantial, and comprehensive contribution to Bridges scholarship and a valuable guide to historians of the literary culture of the Transition era. Donald E. Stanford ______________________ Louisiana State University Yeats Exegesis Catalogued K. P. S. Jochum. W. B. Yeats: A Classified Bibliography of Criticism. Second edition, revised and enlarged. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990. xvi + 1176 pp. $75.00 W. B. YEATS is recognized as one of the greatest poets of the ELT period, and only a few of his contemporaries have received as much 127 ELT : VOLUME 35:1 1992 critical attention as he, but the full extent of the exegesis was not generally recognized until the 1978 publication of the first edition of this massive secondary bibliography. Professor Jochum, in his prefatory remarks to this "Second edition, revised and enlarged," says it "aims at completeness, not at critical selection." He also explains the elimination of several sections, the inclusion of items that earlier had escaped notice and others published in the intervening years. The number of entries has increased from nearly 7500 in the first edition to 10,152, according to the editor's reckoning. The sheer size of the work and its restructuring make it difficult to determine what has been added or omitted. The numbering system is one of the more drastic alterations, making totally obsolete previous references to specific items using the consecutive numbers of the first edition. Seven of the eight general categories are broken down into 46 sub-sections (similar to those in the first edition), each numbered separately and identified by preliminary double letters. The new system, although seemingly cumbersome, is reasonably easy to use and is outlined by reference to the table of contents, with specific explanations given at the beginning of some sections. Jochum describes the classifications and his editorial practices in the preliniinaries. Crossreferences are many, and simple to check as the headlines are both concise and descriptive. The nearly 200 pages of index, under seven separate headings—Names, Institutions, Yeats's Works, Selected Subjects , Periodicals and Selected Series, Chronology—enables the user to quickly find desired references. The last section gives most entries by year of publication, and its inclusion is vaguely explained by the editor, who writes, "Although I believe a classified bibliography...