Responsibilities : manuscript materials

by W. B. Yeats

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From reviews of The Cornell Yeats series: "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, show more coeditor of The Collected Poems of William Carols Williams and Personae: 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) The Cornell Yeats edition of the poetry collection Responsibilities features the only surviving example of Ezra Pound and the author collaboratively revising a poem by Yeats. Working on a set of page proofs of "The Two Kings"?one of the poems in the volume?while they shared Stone Cottage in Sussex during the winter of 1913?1914, Pound wrote proposed revisions and Yeats then reacted to them, accepting some, changing some, and rejecting some. This process of collaborative revision is a precursor of Pound's more extensive marking, nearly a decade later, of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Responsibilities is also of particular interest for its inclusion of a group of poems written about the highly public controversy over the attempts to build a Dublin Modern Art Gallery. Yeats wrote a long, detailed note in 1914 to explain the political background of the poems in this volume. The drafts of the note's sometimes caustic phrasing have survived and are included here. show less

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830+ Works 25,397 Members
William Butler Yeats was born in Dublin, Ireland on June 13, 1865. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and, along with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn, and others, founded the Abbey Theatre, where he served as its chief playwright until the movement was joined by John Synge. Yeats' plays included The Countess Cathleen, The Land of show more Heart's Desire, Cathleen ni Houlihan, The King's Threshold, and Deirdre. Although a convinced patriot, Yeats deplored the hatred and the bigotry of the Nationalist movement, and his poetry is full of moving protests against it. He was appointed to the Irish Senate in 1922. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923 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 is one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize. His poetry collections include The Wild Swans at Coole, Michael Robartes and the Dancer, The Tower, The Winding Stair and Other Poems, and Last Poems and Plays. He died on January 28, 1939 at the age of 73. (Bowker Author Biography) show less

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Classifications

Genres
Fiction and Literature, Poetry, Literature Studies and Criticism
DDC/MDS
821.8Literature & rhetoricEnglish & Old English literaturesEnglish Poetry1837-1899
LCC
PR5904 .R3Language and LiteratureEnglishEnglish Literature19th century , 1770/1800-1890/1900
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English
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Paper
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1