The Only Jealousy of Emer" and "Fighting the Waves": Manuscript Materials

by W.B. Yeats

From reviews of The Cornell Yeats "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 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) Yeats is a poet as much of fact as of feeling. Every work of his has a source―whether from folklore, legend, mythology, the occult, or each a source that for him had a definite objective reality. The demands of this world and of that other world of Yeatsian spiritual reality often conflict. His play The Only Jealousy of Emer, particularly in its early drafts, offers a vivid portrayal of such a struggle. It marks one of the turning points of Yeats's career, because in its final form it is a synthesis of two profound experiences that were to shape his later his marriage to Georgie Hyde-Lees in 1917 brought him a certain degree of contentment with the joys of this world, while her automatic script provided a philosophical framework for his poems and plays. Fighting the Waves―a prose version of The Only Jealousy of Emer staged at the Abbey Theatre in 1929 and revived in London in 1930, but never performed again―is an integral part of the history of Yeats's composition and revision of The Only Jealousy of Emer, and its manuscript drafts are therefore shown in this volume as part of the direct sequence of the composition of The Only Jealousy of Emer, even though Yeats himself ultimately considered Fighting the Waves a lesser work.

432 pages, Hardcover

First published March 3, 2005

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

[Beth · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this in a book of Yeats's Collected Plays. Since I didn't read this edition, I haven't read the prose version "Fighting the Waves" which is in the edition that's listed on GoodReads. This the second play of his I've read (besides The Countess Cathleen). I really liked this, it's beautifully written. It dramatizes one of the stories from the Ulster Cycle of Irish mythology. (The best known translation is probably the one in Lady Gregory's Cuchulain of Muirthemne: The Story of the Men of the Red Branch of Ulster, which I read years ago. The Irish hero Cuchulain is enchanted by Fand, (one of his lovers) the wife of the sea god Manannán mac Lir, and his wife has to break the enchantment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emer#Em...