Last Poems

From the editor's introduction: "Last Poems" embodies W. B. Yeats's remarkable engagement with his impending death, his wish to achieve an accomplished closure of his poetic canon, and his final meditation on his place and part in the mythologies and...

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From the editor's introduction: "Last Poems embodies W. B. Yeats's remarkable engagement with his impending death, his wish to achieve an accomplished closure of his poetic canon, and his final meditation on his place and part in the mythologies and actualities of the Irish culture of his time. The draft materials presented here show him driven by a felt certainty that he had little time to live, yet sustained by an almost uncanny sense of his capacity to complete the volume. As with so many of Yeats's surviving drafts, they show his consummate care and artistry in the shaping of his poetry. They also, however, reveal the extent to which numerous aspects of the volume remained unresolved at his death, and the ways in which the texts of the poems were consequently influenced by the posthumous editorial input of his widow, George Yeats, and his Macmillan editor, Thomas Mark. These materials enrich our knowledge of the extraordinary fertility of Yeats's final creative phase and will contribute significantly to the continuing effort to present the text of the poems in as authoritative a form as possible."In addition to providing a history of each poem's emergence, James Pethica explains the uncertainty that remains regarding textual questions. Invaluable as an archive of Yeats's manuscript revisions, this volume helps to establish the final texts of the last poems Yeats composed and will serve to settle controversies regarding his final intentions.