The Tower: A Facsimile Edition (Yeats Facsimile Edition)

Product Description

The first edition of W. B. Yeats’s
The Tower appeared in bookstores in London on Valentine’s Day, 1928. His English publisher printed just 2,000 copies of this slender volume of twenty-one poems, priced at six shillings. The book was immediately embraced by book buyers and critics alike, and it quickly became a bestseller.
Subsequent versions of the volume made various changes throughout, but this Scribner facsimile edition reproduces exactly that seminal first edition as it reached its earliest audience in 1928, adding an introduction and notes by esteemed Yeats scholar Richard J. Finneran.
Written between 1912 and 1927, these poems (“Sailing to Byzantium,” “Leda and the Swan,” and “Among School Children” among them) are today considered some of the best and most famous in the entire Yeats canon. As Virginia Woolf declared in her unsigned review of this collection, “Mr. Yeats has never written more exactly and more passionately.”

About the Author

William Butler Yeats is generally considered to be Ireland’s greatest poet, living or dead, and one of the most important literary figures of the twentieth century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923.

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Introduction

A last-minute shopper entering a London bookstore on Valentine’s Day in 1928 with six shillings to spend on a gift for his or her beloved could hardly have made a better investment — either poetically or financially — than one of the 2,000 copies of a volume Macmillan & Co. had published that morning:
The Tower by W. B. Yeats. Twenty-one poems in 104 pages; six pages of notes; olive green cloth with a design by T. Sturge Moore stamped in gold on front and spine, also reproduced on the dust jacket. No illustrations, no book club dividends: simply one of the seminal volumes of Modern Poetry, indeed of poetry in English as we know it. Doubtless not every lyric is a masterpiece, but how often have we been given between two covers such “monuments of magnificence” as “Sailing to Byzantium,” “Leda and the Swan,” and “Among School Children” — not to mention “The Tower,” “Meditations in Time of Civil War,” “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” or “Two Songs from a Play”? “A thing never known again,” indeed.

The gestation of
The Tower was a long process. A draft of “The New Faces” was sent to Lady Gregory on 7 December 1912; a draft of “From ‘Oedipus at Colonus'” was sent to Olivia Shakespear on 13 March 1927. Yeats began to publish the poems that would form
The Tower in journals as early as March 1921 and in book form the following year:
Seven Poems and a Fragment, an edition of only 500 copies by the Cuala Press, the private press run by his sisters. Two more Cuala Press volumes would follow —
The Cat and the Moon and Certain Poems (1924), again in a printing of only 500 copies; and
October Blast (1927), one of the rarest of all Cuala publications, only 350 copies. The single poem in
The Tower not previously published would be “Colonus’ Praise.” Finally, on 16 September 1927, Yeats submitted copy for the volume to Macmillan:

I send you…the manuscript of ‘The Tower.’ Feeling that it was exaggerated in certain directions I continually put off sending it, but I cannot delay any longer. If, when you have received the Manuscript, you think the book too small, or have any fault to find, please delay it for a few months.

Yeats went on to explain that he was writing a series of poems for a limited American edition (
The Winding Stair, 1929) and that these could be added to
The Tower in a year. Seldom has a Nobel Laureate been quite so diffident about his latest work.

Although the Cuala Press
Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921) had been included in
Later Poems (1922), Macmillan had not published a major new volume of Yeats’s poetry since
The Wild Swans at Coole (1919). It is thus not surprising that the publisher gave little heed to Yeats’s reservations about
The Tower and ins