Purgatory: Manuscript Materials Including the Author's Final Text

by W.B. Yeats

From reviews of The Cornell Yeats series: "For students of Yeats the whole series is bound to become an essential reference source and a stimulus to important critical re-readings of Yeats's major works. In a wider context, the series will also provide an extraordinary and perhaps unique insight into the creative process of a great artists."-Irish Literary Supplement"I consider the Cornell Yeats one of the most important scholarly projects of our time."-A. Walton Litz, Princeton University, coeditor of The Collected Poems of William Carols Williams and Personae: The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound"The most ambitious of the many important projects in current studies of Yeats and perhaps of modern poetry generally. . . . The list of both general and series editors, as well as prospective preparers of individual volumes, reads like a Who's Who of Yeats textual studies in North America. Further, the project carries the blessing of Yeats's heirs and bespeaks an ongoing commitment from a major university press. . . . The series will inevitably engender critical studies based on a more solid footing than those of any other modern poet. . . . Its volumes will be consulted long after gyres of currently fashionable theory have run on."-Yeats Annual (1983)This book makes available for the first time all extant materials relating to Yeats's play "Purgatory." The earliest drafts reproduced in this book reveal the intensity with which Yeats struggled to perfect his work

Genres: Plays, Classics, Drama, Theatre, Irish Literature

240 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1986

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

[Harrison Glaze · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

[Maddie Margioni · Rating 4 out of 5]

a lot shorter than i was expecting, but did he ever pack it in there. old man (character not author) had some twisted logic (actually maybe both character and author tbh)

[Benja · Rating 5 out of 5]

I actually read Yeats' Last Poems and Two Plays - which includes the plays "The Death of Cuchulain" and "Purgatory" - but chose to mark this book instead for lack of a better option.

Many of the poems concern, in one way or the other, the Irish folk hero Cuchulain, whose death provides the theme to one of the plays. The second and final play, "Purgatory", is a surreal meditation on guilt and man's misguided sense of absolution. In it a father murders his son in front of the old family home, now burned and inhabited by ghosts. The murder is both an echo of the sins of yore - the Old Man had previously murdered his own father - as well as an attempt to halt the bloody cycle. It's brief, mysterious and easily the best part of Yeats' final piece of work.

[Mary Slowik · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I killed that lad because had he grown up
He would have struck a woman's fancy,
Begot, and passed pollution on."

Short, strange, lyrical, morose. I just read Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, which also recalls the past, in a similar if more literal way. Here the technique makes the play seem haunted, full of ghosts and remorse-- a gothic, psychological drama. You can tell Yeats spent a lot of time perfecting this miniature. It suggests that we all carry around personal purgatories, constantly judging and condemning ourselves, regretting our choices (namely parenthood), seeking redemption or rescue when the only escape lies in death. Righteous!

[Rohan Raut]

Purgatory