In The 1890s: British Literature, Art, and Culture,
    ed. G. A. Cevasco (New York and London: Garland
    Publishing Co., 1993)

Publishing History: Poems by W. B. Yeats

Poems by W. B. Yeats was published in 1895 by T. Fisher Unwin, who issued a revised edition in 1899. The original cover design, by Granville Fell, shows on both front and back a winged angelic knight, in Pre-Raphaelite style, wearing rose-embossed armor; a dragon lies under his feet, and slender rose trees rise on both left and right. On the spine, a Celtic harp is caught in the interlaces of the rose foliage, surmounted by a bird with outstretched wings. Yeats was disappointed in what he considered the rather banal angel design, and this cover (creamy tan stamped in gold) was replaced in 1899 by a dark blue one with gold embossing, much like the talismanic covers of The secret Rose (1897) and The Wind Among the Reeds (1899). The designer of these two covers, Althea Gyles--Yeats's fellow student of the occult as well as an artist and poet--also created the design for the 1899 Poems: on the front is a crucified rose, suggesting the "rosy cross" of Rosicrucianism, a key to some of the volume's extensive rose symbolism; on the spine, a lover, like the lovers and questers in some of the poems, lifts hands of vain supplication to his beloved, whose unmoved face appears above him, like an unattainable rose on the tree of life.

Poems, containing "all the writer cares to preserve" from his earlier volumes of poetry, bears a general epigraph from Paracelsus: "He who tastes a crust of bread tastes all the stars and all the heavens," a quotation suggesting the balanced love of opposites--of the earthy bread and the aerial heavens--characterizing much of the volume. The introductory poem, "To Some I Have Talked with by the Fire," refers to the domestic hearthside but also to supernatural beings, thus establishing antinomies that recur in varying combinations throughout the contents. With this volume, Yeats's kinetic art of constant revision and rearrangement of his works becomes quite evident, for the 1895 edition partly rewrites earlier works; the 1899 edition contains numerous changes, including a reordering of the contents; and subsequent editions introduce further alterations. The volume's five sections (in the 1895 order) are as follows: The Wanderings of Usheen (more often spelled Oisin), a long narrative poem first published in 1889; two dramas, The Countess Cathleen and The Land of Heart's Desire, first published in 1892 and 1894 respectively; The Rose, all the lyrics from the 1892 Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics; and Crossways, the short poems from the 1889 Wanderings of Oisin and Other Ballads and two additional ballads. Each section is inividually dedicated and supplied with its own epigraph.

The Wanderings of Usheen is dedicated to Edwin J. Ellis, Yeats's co-editor on a 3-volume edition of William Blake's works (1893). Yeats dated his own use of specifically Irish material to this 1889 poem, based on old Celtic sources, ranging from medieval to eighteenth-century works, that he knew in translation and paraphrase. In a colloquy with St. Patrick, the legendary Fenian hero Usheen repudiates both Catholic Ireland and the fairyland where he has just spent hundreds of years on otherworldly islands with his fairy lover Neave (more often spelled Niamh). Preferring to share the fate of his warrior comrades, whatever it may be, he anticipates the discovery by many later Yeats figures that even paradise, fairy or Christian, is not enough to quell their poignant memories of the human lot.

The Countess Cathleen, dedicated to the Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne whom Yeats loved, is a "miracle play" (in his words), in which "Two Demons" and "Angelical Beings" contend for the soul of a generous countess, who has pledged her own soul in order to save her people from selling theirs to buy food during an Irish famine. When the play was staged in 1899 in Dublin, it incurred abuse from Roman Catholic authorities and required police protection from unruly hecklers because of its unorthodox religious theme and alleged insult to Irish character. The Land of Heart's Desire, though also far from orthodox, had been produced more peacefully in 1894 in London. Portraying a young wife who is lured away from her hearthside, husband, and priest by a fairy child, this drama is related to the short story "The Rose of Shadow" in The Secret Rose (1897); but the story's demonic lover is replaced by the more innocuous child.

The dedication of The Land of Heart's Desire to Yeats's friend and fellow theosophist, the actress Florence Farr, is a reminder of his involvement in working drama with a group including, besides Maud and Florence, Lady Augusta Gregory, Edward Martyn, and George Moore (and, after the turn of the century, J. M. Synge). The Irish Literary Theatre began its productions in 1899 (being replaced in 1902 by the Irish National Dramatic Society and in 1904 by the Abbey Theatre). Although The Countess Cathleen and The Land of Heart's Desire are both verse dramas (usual for Yeats), they show his attempt to produce spoken, not just "poetic," discourse, for he intended them for stage performance from the beginning. Later, around the turn of the century, his poems, too, take on a new sparer style, partly influenced by his experiences in the theater. Yet he opposed "realistic" drama and was impressed by Symbolist works like Villiers de L'Isle Adam's Axel, which he saw in Paris in 1894.

The Rose is a famous collection of lyrics that displays the best of "the Celtic Twilight," combining Irish lore with stylistic features sometimes suggesting the Pre-Raphaelites and the Rhymers' Club, which included Yeats in its membership. The poetry sequence is dedicated, in fact, to fellow Rhymer Lionel Johnson. Some of these poems are important works not only for their supple verse forms and lush imagery but also for their early statements of some of Yeats's most characteristic ideas. "To the Rose upon the Rood of Time," featuring the "rosy cross," addresses immortal beauty (the rose) as it exists in mortal constraints (the cross). The quest for the ineffable suggests Yeats's own Rosicrucianism and membership in the London Theosophical Society, then in the hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Even as he invokes the rose, however, the poet prays to stay in touch with earth's "common things" despite his intoxicated pursuit of ultimate beauty. Yeats later stated his realization that his "rose," though related in some respects to the intellectual beauty pursued by Spenser and Shelley, is distinguished from their ideal by its "suffering" along with mankind, being inextricably bound up with the mortal world. "Rosa Mundi," for example, celebrates eternal beauty as a woman wandering the "grassy road" of earth, occasioning the Trojan War and the deaths of legendary Irish heroes; yet she is anterior to the Archangels, being God's firstborn, "weary and kind." In "The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland," the call of the supernatural constantly impinges upon one man's natural endeavors, leaving him without contentment in life or in death--a fate typical of Yeats's questers.

"To Ireland in the Coming Times" casts Ireland as the particular home of the Muse with "red-rose-bordered hem," thus identifying the rose with Ireland, as some earlier Irish literature had done. The poem explicitly proclaims a patriotic tie between the author and the nineteenth-century Irish poets Thomas Davis, Clarence Mangan, and Samuel Ferguson. Just as Yeats places himself this directly in historic time, however, as a successor to these nationalist authors, he also apostrophizes the timeless "faeries" of a "Druid land" and insists that he is in touch with "wizard things" from the universal "mind" that he elsewhere develops as the Anima Mundi. "Cuchulain's Fight with the Sea," recounting a tragedy from early Gaelic myth, is the first of Yeats's works on the national hero of the title (later the subject of five of his plays and additional poetry). "Fergus and the Druid" also borrows a character from ancient Irish myth.

Another of the best known poems in The Rose is "The Two Trees," in which the poet instructs his beloved to live in touch with the "holy tree" in her heart, avoiding the cursed tree inhabited by ravens of "unresting thought." This tree motif, probably based on the Sephirothic Tree of the Kabalah and also on the Biblical trees of life and knowledge, is adapted to express Yeats's approval of the subjective over the objective and of the affective over the starkly rational. Evidently addressed to Maud--the beloved of many Yeats poems of the period--"The Two Trees" anticipates later works in which the poet denigrates what he considers her obsessive involvement in political agitation. The Countess Cathleen had been written in part to impress her with Yeats's ability to enter the world of action (staging a public drama), but "The Two Trees" counsels inner serenity.

Crossways, containing the earliest works in the volume, is dedicated to the mystical poet A. E. (George Russell), who joined Yeats in his nineties' hope of establishing an Irish center or "castle" of heroes and visionaries. In these poems, however, the Celtic localization is still undeveloped; in them, says Yeats, he "tried many paths." Several poems (favorites of John Todhunter), like "Anashuya and Vijaya," incorporate East Indian settings and situations. "The Indian to His Love," referring to a "glimmering tide" and "vapoury footfall," illustrates the vague, dreamy landscape of some of the poems. Several works, especially "The Song of the Happy Shepherd," with its lost Arcady, are loosely in the pastoral tradition. Still others are ballads like "The Ballad of Moll Magee." One, "Down by the Salley Gardens," is based on an old popular song.

In 1893, Andrew Lang, reviewing the folk tales in Yeats's The Celtic Twilight, found it odd that Ireland had produced "no great literary poet." But the 1889 reviews of The Wanderings of Oisin had already identified Yeats as an estimable writer. Oscar Wilde had found in that poem "nobility" and "the epical temper." To Francis Thompson, the author of The Wanderings suggested Shelley "piping on a fairy straw," causing the critic to propose Yeats playfully as "Titania's Shelley" while adding a more serious acknowledgment of his worth and high promise. In 1894, Robert Louis Stevenson, upon reading "The Lake Isle of Inisfree" (later collected in The Rose) wrote Yeats from Samoa that he ranked the poem with certain Swinburne and Meredith works to which he had "fallen in slavery."

The Blackwood's reviewer of the 1895 Poems still praised Yeats for avoiding Gaelic models and for following in the tradition of Tennyson, Swinburne, and Rossetti, but other reviewers hailed the Irish element. Ernest Rhys, for instance, recognized its "Celtic glamour" while finding Yeats, in his revisions, "more severe" as an artist. Lionel Johnson, assessing the poems even earlier in the Countess Kathleen volume, highlighted Yeats's "'Druid' quality"; and A. E. and John McGrath, writing about the same volume, placed Yeats squarely among Irish writers like Davis, Mangan and Ferguson.

Finally, the Blackwood's critic spoke for most of the literary community when detecting in the 1895 collection "the true poetic ring, impossible to define, impossible to mistake." The 1899 revision went into six editions (partly under the second publisher Ernest Benn), being Yeats's best known volume for more than 30 years and proving especially lucrative for the poet. As early reviews acknowledged only in part, this body of poetry made a remarkably fertile appropriation of diverse traditions, combining Irish and Anglo-Irish strains, elements of French Symbolism (learned chiefly from fellow Rhymer Arthur Symons), a nascent grounding in Eastern art, and English literature in its breadth and variety. The syncretism of the poetry and plays only contributed increasingly to their individuality, and their durability was already assured.

Virginia Hyde
Washington State University