W. B. Yeats’s The Winding Stair and Other Poems was published in 1933 when Yeats was sixty-eight, ten years after he won the Nobel Prize and six years before his death in 1939. Yeats famously invoked in “Adam’s Curse” the time he spent “stitching and unstitching” the lines of his work, but he also spent considerable time stitching and unstitching his poems to each other. The Winding Stair demonstrates that care, combining and reordering the poems of two earlier publications in an edition intended as the companion volume to The Tower, published in 1928.
This Scribner facsimile edition reproduces exactly the pages of the elegantly planned and designed first edition of The Winding Stair and Other Poems as it first appeared, including a photo of the cover design on which Yeats collaborated. It adds an introduction and notes by celebrated Yeats scholar George Bornstein.
Yeats’s longest separate volume of verse, it features sixty-four poems written in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Among them are such masterpieces as “Blood and the Moon,” “Byzantium,” the Coole Park poems, “Vacillation,” and two separately titled long sequences ending with the exquisite lyric “From the ‘Antigone.’” These poems amply justify T. S. Eliot’s contention that Yeats was one of the few poets “whose history is the history of their own time, who are a part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them.”
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First Scribner trade paperback edition March 2011
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This edition offers a facsimile of the first London edition of The Winding Stair and Other Poems, published in London by Macmillan on 19 September 1933. The copy used is that in the Special Collections Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The present edition adds an introduction tracing the assembly and design of the 1933 volume as well as annotations to that edition, including editorial notes on the poems.
I am grateful to the late Richard Finneran of the University of Tennessee and to Samantha Martin of Scribner for suggesting and supporting this project with advice and encouragement. I am also grateful to the splendid librarians at the University of Michigan, in particular Peggy Daub, kathy Beame, Barbara MacAdam, and Judy Avery. Nate Mills and Jessica Morton served as capable research assistants. It is also a pleasure to acknowledge support from the University of Michigan for the early stages of the project and from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the later ones.
This edition is dedicated to the memory of Richard J. and Mary FitzGerald Finneran, in Yeats’s phrase “friends who have been friends indeed,” and to Nora FitzGerald and Rich and Kate Finneran.
ABBREVIATIONS OF WORKS BY W. B. YEATS
EE
Early Essays, vol. 4 of The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran and George Bornstein (New York: Scribner, 2007)
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