William Butler Yeats - Autobiographies: The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Volume III

THE COLLECTED WORKS OF W. B. YEATS

VOLUME III

THE COLLECTED WORKS OF W. B. YEATS

Richard J. Finneran and George Mills Harper, General Editors

VOLUME I The Poems
ed. Richard J. Finneran

VOLUME II The Plays
ed. David R. Clark and Rosalind E. Clark

VOLUME III Autobiographies
ed. William H. ODonnell and Douglas Archibald

VOLUME IV Early Essays
ed. Warwick Gould and Deirdre Toomey

volume v Later Essays
ed. William H. ODonnell

VOLUME IV Prefaces and Introductions
ed. William H. ODonnell

VOLUME VII Letters to the New Island
ed. George Bornstein and Hugh Witemeyer

VOLUME VIII The Irish Dramatic Movement
ed. Mary FitzGerald

VOLUME IX Early Articles and Reviews
ed. John P. Frayne

VOLUME X Later Articles and Reviews
ed. Colton Johnson

VOLUME XI The Celtic Twilight
and The Secret Rose
ed. Warwick Gould, Michael Sidnell, and Deirdre Toomey

VOLUME XII John Sherman and Dhoya
ed. Richard J. Finneran

VOLUME XIII A Vision (1925)
ed. Connie K. Hood and Walter Kelly Hood

VOLUME XIV A Vision (1937)
ed. Connie K. Hood and Walter Kelly Hood

SCRIBNER
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Preface, introduction, notes and compilation copyright 1999 by William H. ODonnell and Douglas N. Archibald

Index copyright 1965 by Macmillan Publishing Company, Inc.

Index copyright renewed 1993 by Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Copyright 1916, 1936 by Macmillan Publishing Company, Inc.

Copyright nenwed 1944, 1964 by Anne Yeats

Dramatis Personae (The Death of Synge, The Bounty of Sweden and
Estrangement)
copyright 1935 by Macmillan Publishing Company, Inc.
www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright nenewed 1963 by Anne Yeats

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and
incidents either
are products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales
or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

SCRIBNER and design are trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

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Set in Sabon

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 0-684-80728-9

ISBN 0-684-85338-8 (pbk.)
eISBN 978-1-451-60321-7

AUTOBIOGRAPHIES
Reveries over Childhood and Youth (w. 1914, publ. 1916)

In 1938, Mrs. Yeats told her husband, AE was the nearest to a saint you or I will ever meet. You are a better poet but no saint. I suppose one has to choose (L 838). It is a distinction Yeats seems to have already endorsed in these lines from The Choice, written in 1931:

The intellect of man is forced to choose

Perfection of the life, or of the work,

And if it take the second must refuse

A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark. (P 246)

But Yeats rarely makes simple choices, presenting us instead with a career of vacillations, of attemptsalways willful, sometimes heroicto have it both ways. No less than Keats, he thought that the poet leads a life of allegory and that his works are comments on it. Before comment, and as part of the process of perfection, comes transformation. He explained, in the First Principles section of his Introduction to his works, written in 1937:

A poet writes always of his personal life, in his finest work out of its tragedies, whatever it be, remorse, lost love, or mere loneliness; he never speaks directly as to someone at the breakfast table, there is always a phantasmagoria. Dante and Milton had mythologies, Shakespeare the characters of English history, or of traditional romance; even when the poet seems most himself, when he is Raleigh and gives potentates the lie, or Shelley a nerve oer which do creep the else unfelt oppressions of mankind, or Byron when the soul wears out the breast as the sword wears out the sheath, he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been re-born as an idea, something intended, complete.(LE 204)

Autobiographies invites us to attend to that rebirth, to the process by which accident and incoherence become complete, by which life, passing through phantasmagoria, becomes meaning, and experience becomes myth. It is that great Romantic achievement: a vision of personal history as art, and Autobiographies is the essential companion to the poems and plays. It shows Yeats at worksummoning his people, realizing his places, making a worldand so continues to dramatize and fulfill his belief that the act of writing entails a complex creation of a self. He had made the point in that bold youthful quatrain about revisions:

The friends that have it I do wrong

When ever I remake a song,

Should know what issue is at stake:

It is myself that I remake. (P 551)

Autobiographies is an allusive and illusive book. Yeats is not careful about details, dates, and references. It is difficult to escape the impression that he is wholly dependable about what is happening to and in his imagination, and how exciting it is, and not fully dependable about anything else. We are convinced that Yeats knew what he was about; like Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, he knew that this wonderful, shrewd, intimate book would ultimately reside in all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria; both writers enjoyed the sense that they were creating projects for future generations of scholars. This is the first edition to take up that challenge by providing a full set of explanatory notes. The 1,003 notes are marked in the text by superscript numbers; the notes are printed on pages 419-527. Those notes selectively include particularly interesting excerpts from earlier versions of revised passages.

Explanatory notes are not used for simple, straightforward mentions of the name of a person, place, organization, or historical event, or of the title of a book, play, poem, or story. Instead, those names and titles are described with 1,500 augmented entries in the index. Those augmented entries provide a persons name, birth and death dates, nationality, and profession; for books or other texts, the augmented entries identify the author, genre, and date. The page references in the index will lead the reader to any other occurrences in the text or notes.

The eighteen notes written by Yeats are printed among the explanatory notes, flagged with the heading WBYS NOTE. If the note was added later or was revised or omitted in any printing, that is mentioned. Explanatory notes to Yeatss notes are marked by superscript letters and are printed immediately following his note.

In Estrangement and The Death of Synge, each of the ninety-six sections is headed with a brief statement of its dating in the manuscript and a cross-reference to the manuscript transcription in Memoirs. For abbreviations of names and titles, see the List of Abbreviations, pages 33-36 below.

Background Notes on Writers, pages 531-539 below, provides a concise introduction to twenty writers who were important to Yeats but who receive only comparatively brief mention in