Editing Yeats Poems: A Reconsideration

by Richard J. Finneran

Description from the This study is offered as a companion to The Poems of W.B. Yeats, a New Edition. Its purposes are, first, to outline the variety and complexity of the problems encountered in editing Yeats's poems; and, secondly, to explain and to defend the solutions adopted for the new text. This study also suggests that any edition of Yeats's poems will always be a provisional one, partly because not all of the manuscript material will be known or available, partly because many of the editorial decisions will have to be subjective and therefore arguable. Having worked with Yeats's texts for some years, I remain convinced that the rigorous application to them of any single editorial policy (e.g. always following the last version printed in his lifetime) is inappropriate. This study therefore approaches the problem of editing Yeats's poems through a variety of publication history, textual analysis based on manuscript evidence, critical interpretation, and so on."

205 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1990

About the author

Richard J. Finneran was general editor, with George Mills Harper, of The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats for many years; series editor of The Poems in the Cornell Yeats; and editor of Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies, among other works. He held the Hodges Chair of Excellence at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville; was a past president of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association; and served as executive director of the Society for Textual Scholarship.