New Poems: Manuscript Materials

by W.B. Yeats, J.C.C. Mays (Editor)

New Poems, the last book that Yeats published in his lifetime, contains 35 poems, including "Lapis Lazuli," "The Municipal Gallery Re-visited," and "The Gyres." It is a volume in which Yeats attempted to make a fresh beginning. In language fueled by rage and frustration, the poems in this collection traverse emotions stimulated by Yeats's feelings toward women, his travels to Majorca, and political ideas inspired or provoked by Charles Parnell, Roger Casement, and Oliver Cromwell. "New Poems," write the editors, "has the newness of discovery in a vortex of exhaustion, desire, and calculation. . . . The sense of a renewal in the eighth decade of Yeats's life was precarious and, when it came, especially poignant."

The materials gathered here reveal the process by which Yeats wrote individual poems, established relations among them, and considered their possible placement in the collection. Photographs of drafts, stanzas floating within-but not trapped by-the margins of loose-leaf pages, in Yeats's characteristically illegible hand, are accompanied by the editors' transcriptions. Four appendixes contain an illustration for New Poems, Yeats's draft of the volume's table of contents, a poem written in collaboration between Yeats and Dorothy Wellesley, and three unpublished ballads.

Genres: Poetry

448 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1938

About the author

William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and dramatist, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years Yeats served as an Irish Senator for two terms. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival, and along with Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn founded the Abbey Theatre, serving as its chief during its early years. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for what the Nobel Committee described as "inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation." He was the first Irishman so honored. Yeats is generally considered one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize; such works include The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1929).

Yeats was born and educated in Dublin but spent his childhood in County Sligo. He studied poetry in his youth, and from an early age was fascinated by both Irish legends and the occult. Those topics feature in the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the century. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and those slow paced and lyrical poems display debts to Edmund Spenser and Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as to the Pre-Raphaelite poets. From 1900, Yeats' poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life.
--from Wikipedia

Reviews

[Christopher]

Published in 1938, this was Yeats’ last collection and treads familiar ground after his work of the 1920s. To claim, as some have, that Yeats was striking out in any new direction is pure exaggeration, though one does very occasionally get a sense that this is a collection written at a dramatic moment in world history and the poet’s own life: World War II is already on the horizon, and Yeats himself was sensing the end of his life approaching. Nevertheless, the poetry is never good enough for this context to be very emotionally moving.

The opening “The Gyres” (one rather groans to hear that word, like yet another instance of “usura” in Pound) dwells again on his esoteric system of the world, with history as a series of interlocking cycles, that had inspired the much-anthologized and better “The Second Coming”:

The gyres! the gyres! Old Rocky Face look forth;
Things thought too long can be no longer thought
For beauty dies of beauty, worth of worth,
And ancient lineaments are blotted out.
Irrational streams of blood are staining earth;
Empedocles has thrown all things about;
Hector is dead and there's a light in Troy;
We that look on but laugh in tragic joy. […]

A substantial number of poems here were conceived as songs, with each stanza ending in an invariable (or nearly so) refrain. Music composed for five of these poems is presented at the end of the original edition of New Poems. This is highly annoying, the refrains give poems that might have worked otherwise the feeling of filk music from some godawful fandom convention.

For a poet who achieved so universal a reputation in the English-speaking world, Yeats did spend a lot of time on Irish political themes unfamiliar to readers abroad (and possibly to many in Ireland today). “Parnell”, consisting of a single couplet, is a concise example: “Parnell came down the road, he said to a cheering man: ‘Ireland shall get her freedom and you still break stone.’” Otherwise, there are two poems here dealing with Roger Casement, in one of which Yeats takes the side that his infamous diaries were a forgery.

I tried to read with an open mind, but I suspect that Yeats will just never click for me, except for the handful of highly canonized poems one learns in school or soon thereafter.

The Irish University Press edition from 1970, a photographic reprint of the original 1938 edition, was an ideal way to read this poetry, the sheer physical pleasure of its hard covers, high-quality sewn binding, and creamy paper compensating a bit for the disappointing verse within.

[Lawrence Hall]

This one didn't work for me; this is no reflection on Mr. Yeats. I much prefer his earlier work.

[Rabha Aishwarya]

"I have cupboards of dried fragrance,
I can stew the sheet."