Yeats Reveals His Art
UNTERECKER, JOHN
Yeats Reveals His Art The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats. Ed. by Peter Allt & Russell K. Alspach. Macmillan. 884 pp. $18.50. Reviewed by John Unterecker Instructor of English,...
...For no one knew so well as he the importance of his life-long revision of his poems...
...Take, for example, the early poem "The Indian to His Love...
...Now at last the full record of that rewriting has been assembled...
...This is the final draft: "The island dreams under the dawn And great boughs drop tranquillity...
...Just as interesting, however, are the lines that escape significant revision...
...Using as their basic text the 1949 "Definitive Edition" (Yeats had corrected proof for it during his last illness, but the war delayed publication until ten years after his death), Allt and Alspach trace the variants in each poem from its initial publication to its final form...
...They didn't really significantly reconstruct the fundamental design of the poem...
...In Yeats's case, most of these are early poems or songs from plays...
...As late as 1930, nine years before his death, he welcomed plans for an "Edition de Luxe" of his poems with a joyous note to his old friend Mrs...
...In observing the changes, we can learn a great deal about the creative process itself...
...Almost as interesting as the successful poems of a great poet are those which, for one reason or another, he deletes after one or more printings from his collected works...
...The result is a liberal education in the art of a great poet...
...What happiness...
...There dreamy Time lets fall his sickle And Life the sandals of her fleetness, And sleek young Joy is no more fickle, And Love is kindly and deceitless, And life is over save the murmur and the sweetness...
...The peahens dance on a smooth lawn, A parrot sways upon a tree, Raging at his own image in the enamelled sea...
...Originally a 25-line poem with a different title, in its final draft it is reduced to 20 lines, all but three of them at least in part rewritten...
...Were there space, it might be worthwhile to note all the changes in all the revisions of the poem (Yeats revised it eight times, printing it—all told—in 25 different collections of his poetry), but this sample indicates well enough the sort of changes Yeats made...
...Yeats recognizes the core of the poem in that raging parrot, and the lines are only slightly altered...
...We have, as a result, for the first time in one volume all of the poetry Yeats published and all the variations in those poems...
...This is what the beginning of the poem looked like in 1886 when it was first published in the Dublin University Review: "Oh wanderer in the southern weather, Our isle awaits us, on each lea The peahens dance, in crimson feather A parrot swaying on a tree Rages at his own image in the enamelled sea...
...But they did strengthen that design, pull images more sharply into focus, pare away deadwood...
...The most obvious change, of course, is the disappearance of the entire second stanza with its abstractions Time, Life, Joy and Love...
...No unpublished poems are included and, for obvious reasons of space, none of the innumerable manuscript versions...
...These have been carefully preserved in the Variorum Yeats...
...In fact, as all his readers know, he never did give those revisions up...
...In 1907, for instance, writing to A. H. Bullen, he tried to explain the value of revision: "Why I have been so insistent upon my revisions etc, in this expensive edition is that I know I must get my general personality and the total weight of my work into people's minds, as a preliminary to new work...
...Shakespear: "Months of re-writing...
...His project, of course, was to hammer out a homogeneous body of poetry, a "collected works" which would be as organically integrated as a man, as carefully designed as a Greek temple...
...In each edition of his poems, he corrected, rewrote or abandoned poems from earlier editions...
...in the last we are already there...
...Reviewed by John Unterecker Instructor of English, CCNY This great edition of Yeats's poems, ten years in the making, is, I think, precisely the sort of literary monument he would most have liked...
...I know that I have just reached a time when I can give up constant revisions but not till the old is right...
...but there is also a cancellation of poetic diction ("our isle" becomes "the island") and a real gain in immediacy (in the first version the isle "awaits us...
Vol. 41 • January 1958 • No. 3
