Under the Moon - Hardcover

Yeats, William Butler

3.94

72 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684802546 ISBN 13: 9780684802541

Publisher: Scribner, 1995

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While working on a facsimile edition and transcription of W. B. Yeats's surviving early manuscripts, renowned Yeats scholar George Bornstein made a thrilling literary discovery: thirty-eight unpublished poems written between the poet's late teens and late twenties. These works span the crucial years during which the poet "remade himself from the unknown and insecure young student Willie Yeats to the more public literary, cultural, and even political figure W. B. Yeats whom we know today." "Here is a poetry marked by a rich, exuberant, awk-ward, soaring sense of potential, bracingly youthful in its promise and its clumsiness, in its moments of startling beauty and irrepressible excess," says Brendan Kennelly. And the Yeats in these pages is already experimenting with those themes with which his readers will become intimate: his stake in Irish nationalism; his profound love for Maud Gonne; his intense fascination with the esoteric and the spiritual.
With Bornstein's help, one can trace Yeats's process of self-discovery through constant revision and personal reassessment, as he develops from the innocent and derivative lyricist of the early 1880s to the passionate and original poet/philosopher of the 1890s.
Reading-texts of over two dozen of these poems appear here for the first time, together with those previously available only in specialized literary journals or monographs. Bornstein has assembled all thirty-eight under the title Yeats had once planned to give his first volume of collected poems. Under the Moon is essential reading for anyone interested in modern poetry.

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About the Author:

William Butler Yeats is generally considered to be Ireland’s greatest poet, living or dead, and one of the most important literary figures of the twentieth century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923.

From Booklist:

Here is the fulfillment of a literary scholar's dream--previously unknown poems by one of the masters. They might have been just embarrassing juvenilia, of course, but at best, they would be a vital source for understanding a great poet's later glories and include a few poems worthy of the definitive editions. Happily, they are almost entirely the latter. Oh, there are a few poems of only academic interest that should give heart to aspiring poets anywhere; if Yeats could ever have written them, there is hope for lesser souls yet. There are earlier versions that were later improved: for example, "my life is under thy sad feet" was later transmuted into "Tread softly because you tread upon my dreams." Still other poems here were withheld from publication because they too rawly revealed Yeats' relationship with Maude Gonne; these include the marvelously moving "A Dream of a Life Before This One," in which the poet records one of his beloved's dreams: ". . . we went alone on our journey, and envied the grass-covered dead, / For Love had gone by us unheeding, a crown of stars on his head." A helpful introduction places the poems in their literary and biographical contexts. Patricia Monaghan

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