The Winding Stair and Other Poems: A Facsimile Edition

by W.B. Yeats, George Bornstein (Introduction)

An exact facsimile of the 1933 first edition of W.B. Yeats’s The Winding Stair and Other Poems, a famously beautiful, elegant volume intended as a companion to The Tower—with an Introduction and notes by the eminent Yeats scholar George Bornstein. Published in 1933 when W.B. Yeats was sixty-eight, The Winding Stair and Other Poems is his longest stand-alone volume of verse. Previously unavailable as a single volume, this beautiful edition will appeal to both general readers and textual scholars. Featuring sixty-four poems from the late 1920s and early 1930s, among them such masterpieces as “Blood and the Moon,” “Byzantium,” the Coole Park poems, “Vacillation,” and two separately titled long sequences including the Crazy Jane poems and ending with the exquisite lyric “From the ‘Antigone,’” this edition also includes an Introduction and notes by celebrated Yeats scholar George Bornstein. These poems amply justify T. S. Eliot’s contention that Yeats was one of the few poets “whose history is the history of their own time, who are a part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them.”

Genres: Poetry, Classics, Ireland, 20th Century

176 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1933

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

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

Anyway read this one today by accident it's a classic a banger I love to see the man do it well. Blood and the Moon you merciless breaker. Many many highlights maybe I'll go through him all soon

[Descending Angel · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of 30 poems from 1933. Highlights - "words for music perhaps" " a woman young and old" "a dialogue of self and soul"

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Steeped in real people and Irish folklore, I'd have been lost without Yeats' own notes , an Appendix, and more Explanatory Notes from editors. I most enjoyed the poems told from "Crazy Jane's"* POV. Loved this, from "A Last Confession": 'There's not a bird of day that dare Extinguish that delight [of pure physical love]." *Based on the real (?) "Cracked Mary of County Galway.

[Cooper Renner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rereading, this time print instead of ebook. Yeats always has the music—which most current poets don’t—but his occasional and esoteric poems aren’t always much to remember. 2024

Yeats wrote some of the finest poems of the 20th century of course, and the level of quality in this late work is uniformly high. There aren't as many "famous" poems as in other volumes, perhaps, though "Byzantium" is here--"That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea"--and "Words for Music Perhaps," a sequence featuring the Crazy Jane poems which is the highlight of the volume. This is an odd ebook--a PDF rather than an epub, done in order to preserve the facsimile nature of the collection. That's a fine thing to do in print, but in ebook format, it's not necessarily helpful: a little more difficult to navigate and certainly more difficult to read on a small device, a smart phone or an iPod. It probably would have been a better decision to reproduce the text, but not the formatting! Extensive notes, which I didn't read all of, to be sure, and a helpful introduction accompany the photo-facsimile of the original first edition.

[M.E. Kinkade · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read a poem a day during the workweek to try to increase my poetry diet, and maybe this was the wrong book for that. I love the lyricism of Yeats, but so many of the references were intertwined and so relevant to 1900s Ireland that I struggled. Perhaps not a good intro to poetry.

[Ross Cohen]

Yeats remains one of my favorite poets. Few others possessed a vision as complete, or as strange, as Yeats, and those who did couldn't keep a foot as firmly in the real as Yeats.

Breathtaking.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

These are good, but they're honestly all starting to run together at this point. This 4 is not the same as the other collections' 4s, but there are some things in here that really work well.

[Rabha Aishwarya · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The old perplexity and empty purse,
On the day's vanity, the nights remorse.."

[Dolf van der Haven · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nobel Prize in Literature 1923.
Technically excellent poems, but only few of them actually appealed to me.

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

My Soul. I summon to the winding ancient stair;
Set all your mind upon the steep ascent,
Upon the broken, crumbling battlement,
Upon the breathless starlit air,
'Upon the star that marks the hidden pole;
Fix every wandering thought upon
That quarter where all thought is done:
Who can distinguish darkness from the soul

My Self. The consecretes blade upon my knees
Is Sato's ancient blade, still as it was,
Still razor-keen, still like a looking-glass
Unspotted by the centuries;
That flowering, silken, old embroidery, torn
From some court-lady's dress and round
The wodden scabbard bound and wound
Can, tattered, still protect, faded adorn

My Soul. Why should the imagination of a man
Long past his prime remember things that are
Emblematical of love and war?
Think of ancestral night that can,
If but imagination scorn the earth
And intellect is wandering
To this and that and t'other thing,
Deliver from the crime of death and birth.

My Self. Montashigi, third of his family, fashioned it
Five hundred years ago, about it lie
Flowers from I know not what embroidery -
Heart's purple - and all these I set
For emblems of the day against the tower
Emblematical of the night,
And claim as by a soldier's right
A charter to commit the crime once more.

My Soul. Such fullness in that quarter overflows
And falls into the basin of the mind
That man is stricken deaf and dumb and blind,
For intellect no longer knows
Is from the Ought, or knower from the Known -
That is to say, ascends to Heaven;
Only the dead can be forgiven;
But when I think of that my tongue's a stone.

II

My Self. A living man is blind and drinks his drop.
What matter if the ditches are impure?
What matter if I live it all once more?
Endure that toil of growing up;
The ignominy of boyhood; the distress
Of boyhood changing into man;
The unfinished man and his pain
Brought face to face with his own clumsiness;

The finished man among his enemies? -
How in the name of Heaven can he escape
That defiling and disfigured shape
The mirror of malicious eyes
Casts upon his eyes until at last
He thinks that shape must be his shape?
And what's the good of an escape
If honour find him in the wintry blast?

I am content to live it all again
And yet again, if it be life to pitch
Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch,
A blind man battering blind men;
Or into that most fecund ditch of all,
The folly that man does
Or must suffer, if he woos
A proud woman not kindred of his soul.

I am content to follow to its source
Every event in action or in thought;
Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!
When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness flows into the breast
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest.

[Drew · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I really click with a writer, I feel as though I've entered into a kind of allegiance. And so, while no single poem in Yeats' "The Winding Stair and Other Poems" rises to the high points of a previous mind-blowing collection I'd read (title, forgotten), I forgave easily and foraged more deeply as I went from page to page and verse to verse. This particular book had me contemplating the less showy pleasures of off-rhymes and eye-rhymes, the benefit of the unusual rhyme schemes, and Yeats' sensationally sure sense of rhythm. When a line felt off by a syllable, I would sometimes re-read the stanza with an inserted breath and suddenly, I could see why Yeats had left out what initially appeared to be missing. I also enjoyed his idiosyncratic punctuation which added a space before semi-colons, exclamation points, and question marks, thereby making their presence more prominent. (Periods and commas required no emphasis.) As for George Bornstein's notes at the end, they're neither necessary nor distracting as they provide brief asides, explanations, and/or publishing histories on poems without ever bogging you down with too much information.

[T.L. Cooper · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Winding Stair and Other Poems by W. B. Yeats contains a myriad of poems the manage to be both mired in their time and timeless. Yeats takes ordinary events in ordinary lives and writes about them in poems that touch people's hearts and minds even years after they were written. While one might not know the characters about whom he writes, the experiences feel all too real reminding the reader that there are certain experiences that transcend time, boundaries, and locale. With lines that demand the reader read them one, twice, thrice just to feel the entirety of their meaning, The Winding Stair and Other Poems often feels like it's pushing beyond the page and into the shared experience of being human even while searching for what that shared experience really means.

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

And now we stare astonished at the sea,
And a miraculous strange bird shrieks at us.
[90]

[siya · Rating 2 out of 5]

yeah i didn't like this sorry yeats.

[Lahierbaroja · Rating 4 out of 5]

Split milk
We that have done and thought
that have thought and done
must ramble, and thin out
like milk spilt on a stone


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