William Butler Yeats - The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Volume V

CHARLES SCRIBNERS SONS
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the authors imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 1994 by Michael Yeats

Editorial matter copyright 1994 William H. ODonnell

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

SCRIBNERS and colophon are registered trademarks of Macmillan, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

(Revised for vol. 5)

Yeats, W. B. (William Butler), 1865-1939.

The collected works of W.B. Yeats

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Contents: v. 1. The poems / edited by Richard J. Finneran v. 5. Later essays / edited by William H. ODonnell[etc.]v. 7. Letters to the new island / edited by George Bornstein and Hugh Witemeyer.

I. Finneran, Richard J. II. Harper, George Mills.

PR5900.A2F56 1989 821.8 88.27365

ISBN 0-02-632701-5 (v. 1)

ISBN-13: 978-0-0263-2702-2

eISBN-13: 978-1-4391-0618-1

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

VOLUME III: Autobiographies,
ed. William H. ODonnell, Douglas Archibald, J. Fraser Cocks III, and Gretchen L. Schwenker

VOLUME IV: Early Essays,
ed. Warwick Gould and Deirdre Toomey

VOLUME V: Later Essays,
ed. William H. ODonnell

VOLUME VI: 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: Mythologies,
ed. Warwick Gould, Phillip L. Marcus, and Michael Sidnell

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

THE COLLECTED WORKS OF W. B. YEATS

VOLUME V

LATER ESSAYS

Swedenborg, Mediums, and the Desolate Places
(w. 1914), in Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland, by Lady Gregory (1920)

ESSAYS 1931 TO 1936

Bishop Berkeley
Introduction to Bishop Berkeley, by Joseph M. Hone and Mario M. Rossi (1931)

My Friends Book (1932)
Review of Song and its Fountains, by AE (George Russell)

Introduction to An Indian Monk
An Indian Monk: His Life and Adventures, by Shri Purohit Swami (1932)

Introduction to The Holy Mountain
The Holy Mountain: Being the Story of a Pilgrimage to Lake Mnas and of Initiation on Mount Kails in Tibet, by Bhagwn Shri Hamsa, tr. Shri Purohit Swmi (1934)

Gitanjali
Introduction to Gitanjali (Song Offerings), by Rabindranath Tagore (1912)

The Ten Principal Upanishads (w. 1936; dated 1937)
Preface to The Ten Principal Upanishads, tr. Shree Purohit Swmi and W. B. Yeats (1937)

Aphorisms of Yoga
Introduction to Aphorisms of Yga, by Bhagwn Shree Patanjali, tr. Shree Purohit Swmi (1938)

Introduction (w. 1937)
For the never-published Charles Scribners Sons Dublin Edition of W. B. Yeats; published in Essays and Introductions (1961) as A General Introduction for my Work

Introduction to Essays (w. 1937)
For the never-published Charles Scribners Sons Dublin Edition of W. B. Yeats; published in Essays and Introductions (1961)

EDITORS PREFACE

This volume in The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats contains the essays that Yeats wrote from 1912 onwards and that he collected in the Cuala Press volume Essays 1931 to 1936 or that he specifically selected for the collected editions of his works. One essay, If I were Four-and-Twenty (1919), which was collected posthumously in a Cuala Press volume, is included here for convenience because it is not available in Uncollected Prose or Prefaces and Introductions. One essay from this period, Certain Noble Plays of Japan (1916), is placed in the Early Essays volume of this edition because in 1919 Yeats had incorporated that essay in the revised version of an earlier collection, The Cutting of an Agate (1912; rev. 1919), and it remained there in Essays (1924).

Later Essays opens with Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1917) and closes with On the Boiler (written 1938; publ. 1939). The essays are arranged generally according to their dates of publication, except that the nine essays of Essays 1931 to 1936 are kept in the topical order of that collection, together with its brief preface. Yeats placed three essays about Indian topics at the end of Essays 1931 to 1936, and I have chosen to follow them with his three other Indian essays: the introductions to Gitanjali (1912) by Tagore, Ten Principal Upanishads (1937) and Aphorisms of Yga (dated 1937; publ. 1938) by Patanjali. Also included are the two essays that Yeats contributed to Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland (dated 1914; publ. 1920) by Lady Gregory, Swedenborg, Mediums, and the Desolate Places and Witches and Wizards and Irish Folk-Lore, printed here in the sequence according to Yeatss holograph instructions, but which the American printer ignored in 1920. The other essays are Yeatss introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936) and two of his introductions (written 1937) for the never-published Charles Scribners Sons collected edition (Dublin Edition). The Introduction to Plays, written for Charles Scribners Sons edition, is placed in the Plays volume of this edition.

The simultaneous need for explanatory annotation and for careful editing of the texts can be demonstrated with two brief examples of textual corruption that stemmed from imperfect understanding of references. One example is in Swedenborg, Mediums, and the Desolate Places (1914), where the typescript (NLI Ms. 30,623, p. 37) and the first printed text correctly refer to the juggler Houdin, the French magician Robert Houdin (1805-71), who, as Yeats explains, when sent to Morocco by the French Government, was able to break the prestige of the dervishes (p. 64, 11. 28-29 below). However, in the Cuala Press Essays 1931 to 1936, which is the copy-text for the present edition, Houdin was printed wrongly as Houdini, a confusion with the American magician Harry Houdini (Ehrich Weiss, 1874-1926)whose stage name paid homage to Houdin. The incorrect Houdini was retained by Macmillan in Explorations (1962) and was also used in the Coole Edition of the Works of Lady Gregory (1970). Another example is a reference to