"Words for Music Perhaps" and Other Poems

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, 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)

Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems (1932) has been called W. B. Yeats's finest single volume. It features not only the great series for which it is named—a series that includes the Crazy Jane poems—but also single poems such as "Byzantium" and "Coole Park, 1929." This edition records every draft, from Yeats's first notion to the published version, a majority both in facsimile (in Yeats's fiercely illegible hand) and in faithful transcription on facing pages. A census of manuscripts identifies the source among Yeats's papers of each draft, and appendices trace the writing of the poems through notebooks, loose manuscripts, and galley proofs with Yeats's corrections and copious additions.

This volume contains all the manuscripts of "Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop,"—a poem added in The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933). It also includes drafts of the unpublished "Crazy Jane and the King," completing the presentation of the Crazy Jane poems.

The Cornell Yeats edition of The Winding Stair (1929) and the present volume together provide all the poems that were gathered to make The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933), Yeats's great "counter-truth" and companion volume to The Tower (1928).