Poetry. London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1936 [lecture]; ed., The Oxford Book of Modern Verse. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936; ed., and translated with Shree Purohit Swami, The Ten Principal Upanishads. London: Faber, [1937]; Nine One-Act Plays. London: Macmillan, 1937; A Vision. London: Macmillan, 1937 [contains much new material]; ed., with Dorothy Wellesley, Broadsides. Dublin: Cuala, 1937 [ssued individually throughout 1937 and as a bound volume in December 1937]; Essays, 1931 to 1936. Dublin: Cuala, 1937; The Herne’s Egg. London: Macmillan, 1938. (Play); New Poems. Dublin: Cuala, 1938; The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats. New York: Macmillan, 1938 [consisting of ‘Reveries over Childhood and Youth,’ ‘The Trembling of the Veil,’ and ‘Dramatis Personae’]; Last Poems and Two Plays. Dublin: Cuala, 1939 [The plays are ‘The Death of Cuchulain’ and ‘Purgatory’]; On the Boiler. Dublin: Cuala, [1939]; Last Poems and Plays. London: Macmillan, 1940. (The selection of poems varies from Last Poems and Two Plays); If I Were Four-and-Twenty. Dublin: Cuala, 1940; Pages from a Diary Written in Nineteen Hundred and Thirty. Dublin: Cuala, 1944; Tribute to Thomas Davis. (Cork University Press/Oxford: B. H. Blackwell, 1947 [with a foreword by Denis Gwynn and ‘An Unpublished Letter’ by AE]; The Poems of W. B. Yeats. 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1949; The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. London: Macmillan, 1950/New York: Macmillan, 1951; Diarmuid and Grania, with George Moore. [Dublin]: Reprinted from the Dublin Magazine (April-June 1951).

The Yeats bibliography is immense, as can be seen from the preceding compilation, which lists only major editions. In recent years, Yeats scholarship has started to produce reliable collected editions. Of The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Richard Finneran & George Mills Harper, general eds. (London: Macmillan/New York: Scribner’s), the following have appeared: Vol. 1, The Poems, R. J. Finneran, ed. (1989); Vol. 5, Later Essays, William H. O’Donnell, ed. (1994); Vol. 6, Prefaces and Introductions, William H. O’Donnell, ed. (1988, i.e., 1989); Vol. 7, Letters to the New Island, George Bornstein, ed. (1989); Vol. 12, John Sherman and Dhoya, R. J. Finneran, ed. (1992). Editions of the poems are affected by quarrels about textual and editorial procedures. The Finneran edition is basic to The Poems, Daniel Albright, ed. (London: Dent, 1990), whereas the different editorial principles of Warwick Gold are explained in Yeats’s Poems, A. Norman Jeffares, ed. (London: Macmillan, 1989). Further arguments about textual problems are put forward in Finneran’s Editing Yeats’s Poems: A Reconsideration (London: Macmillan, 1990). No such effort has gone into the publication of the plays; the Macmillan London edition of Collected Plays (1952) is still the best text. The serious student who wants to reconstruct and appreciate the frequent revisions that Yeats undertook must consult The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, Peter Allt & Russell K. Alspach, eds. (corrected 3rd printing, 1966), and The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W. B. Yeats, Russell K. Alspach, ed. (corrected 2nd printing, 1966). The preceding volumes and all subsequent ones, unless otherwise noted, were published in London and New York by Macmillan.

Much of Yeats’s prose has been collected, including Autobiographies (1955), Mythologies (1959), The Senate Speeches of W. B. Yeats, Donald R. Pearce, ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960); Essays and Introductions (1961); Explorations (1962); Memoirs (the early draft of the autobiography), Denis Donoghue, ed. (1972); and Uncollected Prose, John P. Frayne & Colton Johnson, eds. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970 1975, 2 vols.). Yeats’s fragmentary novel, The Speckled Bird, was edited by William H. O’Donnell (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1976). The first edition of A Vision is available as A Critical Edition of Yeats’s A Vision (1925), George Mills Harper & Walter Kelly Hood, eds. (London: Macmillan, 1978); the revised version of 1937 is part of A Vision and Related Writings, A. Norman Jeffares, ed. (London: Arena, 1990). Another useful prose selection is Writings on Irish Folklore, Myth and Legend, Robert Welch, ed. (London: Penguin, 1993).

The Letters of W. B. Yeats, Alan Wade, ed. (London: Hart-Davis, 1954/New York: Macmillan, 1955) is now being replaced by The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, John Kelly, general ed. (Oxford: Clarendon); of the projected twelve volumes the first and third, comprising the years 18651895 and 1901-1904, were published in 1986 and 1994. This edition will no doubt include letters already printed in such volumes as Letters on Poetry from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley (London & New York: Oxford University Press, 1940); Florence Farr, Bernard Shaw and W. B. Yeats, Clifford Bax, ed. (Dublin: Cuala, 1941); W. B. Yeats and T. Sturge Moore: Their Correspondence, 1901-1937, Ursula Bridge, ed. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul/New York: Oxford University Press, 1953); Letters to Katharine Tynan, Roger McHugh, ed. (Dublin: Clonmore & Reynolds/New York: McMullen, 1953); and The Correspondence of Robert Bridges and W. B. Yeats, Richard J. Finneran, ed. (London: Macmillan, 1977). Abbey Theatre affairs are treated in Theatre Business: The Correspondence of the First Abbey Theatre Directors: William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, and J. M. Synge, Ann Saddlemyer, ed. (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1982). Yeats’s relationship with Maud Gonne is chronicled in The Gonne-Yeats Letters 1893-1938, Anna McBride White & A. Norman Jeffares, eds. (London: Hutchinson, 1992/New York: Norton, 1993). Three collections of letters to Yeats are of interest: John Butler Yeats: Letters to His Son W. B. Yeats and Others, 18691922, Joseph Hone, ed. (London: Faber, 1944/New York: Dutton, 1946); Letters to W. B. Yeats, Richard J. Finneran et al., eds. (London: Macmillan, 1977); and The Letters of John Quinn to William Butler Yeats, Alan Himber, ed. (Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1983). Yeats’s complex publishing history is given in Allan Wade’s A Bibliography of the Writings of W. B. Yeats, 3d ed., revised by Russell K. Alspach (London: Hart-Davis/New York: Oxford University Press, 1968); Colin Smythe is at work on a 4th edition. The enormous amount of secondary material is listed in K.P.S. Jochum’s W. B. Yeats: A Classified Bibliography of Criticism, 2d ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990); it is updated in the annual checklists printed in Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies, beginning with Vol. 8 (1990). An extensive survey of works about Yeats is provided by Richard J. Finneran, ed., in Anglo-Irish Literature: A Review of Research, supplemented by Recent Research on Anglo-Irish Writers (both published New York: Modern Language Association, 1976, 1983). Further reference material includes Stephen Maxfield Parrish & James Allan Painter: A Concordance to the Poems of W. B. Yeats and Eric Domville: A Concordance to the Plays of W. B. Yeats (both published Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1963, 1972); Edward O’Shea: A Descriptive Catalog of W. B. Yeats’s Library (New York: Garland, 1985); and Conrad A. Balliet’s somewhat preliminary W. B. Yeats: A Census of the Manuscripts (New York: Garland, 1990).

A definitive biography is being undertaken by R. F. Foster; at present Joseph Hone’s W. B. Yeats 1865-1939 (London: Macmillan, 1942, i.e., 1943) and Richard Ellmann’s Yeats: The Man and the Masks, revised ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979) can still be read with profit. Recent biographies include Frank Tuohy: Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1976); a short popular account by Augustine Martin: W. B. Yeats (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1983); and a more extensive work by A. Norman Jeffares: W. B. Yeats: A New Biography (London: Hutchinson, 1988). William M. Murphy was written on The Yeats Family and the Pollexfens of Sligo (Dublin: Dolmen, 1977), and the massive biography of Yeats’s father, Prodigal Father: The Life of John Butler Yeats (Ithaca, N,Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978), and also Family Secrets: William Butler Yeats and His Relatives (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1995). One of Yeats’s most important friends is the subject of John Harwood’s Olivia Shakespear and W. B. Yeats: After Long Silence (London: Macmillan, 1989). Ann Saddlemyer is at work on the authorised biography of Mrs. W. B. Yeats. Micheal Mac Liammoir and Eavan Boland collaborated on the richly illustrated W. B. Yeats and His World (London: Thames & Hudson, 1971). On the poet’s background in the art world, see The World of W. B. Yeats, Robin Skelton & Ann Saddlemyer, eds. (Dublin: Dolmen, 1965); for Sligo, see Shellah Kirby: The Yeats Country, revised ed. (Dublin: Dolmen, 1977); for the Dublin scene, Richard M. Kain: Dublin in the Age of W. B. Yeats and James Joyce (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962). Biographical material is also contained in W. B. Yeats: Interviews and Recollections, E. H. Mikhail, ed. (London: Macmillan, 1976); and the late Karin Strand’s Ph.D. thesis, ‘W. B. Yeats’ American Lecture Tours’ (Northwestern University, 1978), which deserves publication.

Yeats’s painstaking craftsmanship is revealed in studies of manuscript drafts by Curtis Bradford, Yeats at Work (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965), and by Jon Stallworthy, Between the Lines: Yeats’s Poetry in the Making and Vision and Revision in Yeats’s Last Poems (both London: Oxford University Press, 1963, 1969). Recently the manuscript versions of several texts have been published: they include Druid Craft: The Writing of ‘The Shadowy Waters,’ Michael J. Sidnell et al., eds. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1971); The Writing of ‘The Player Queen,’ Curtis Bradford, ed. (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1977); The Writing of ‘Sophocles’ King Oedipus,’ David R. Clark & James B. McGuire, eds. (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1989); The Secret Rose: A Variorum Edition, revised ed., Warwick Gould et al., eds. (London: Macmillan, 1992). In the Cornell Yeats series of manuscript reproductions (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press), the following titles are available: The Death of Cuchulain, Philip L. Marcus, ed. (1982); Purgatory, Sandra F. Siegel, ed. (1986); The Early Poetry, George Bornstein, ed. (1987-1994, 2 vols.); The Herne’s Egg, Allison Armstrong, ed. (1993); The Wind among the Reeds, Carolina Holdsworth, ed. (1993); The Hour-Glass, Catherine Phillips, ed. (1994); and Michael Robartes and the Dancer, Thomas Parkinson, ed. (1994). Yeats’s and Mrs. Yeats’s automatic scripts and notebooks that led to the writing of A Vision have been published as Yeats’s ‘Vision’ Papers, George Mills Harper, general ed. (London: Macmillan/Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992, 3 vols.); these volumes should be used in conjunction with Harper’s The Making of Yeats’s ‘A Vision’ (London: Macmillan, 1986).

Good introductions to Yeats’s work are Balachandra Rajan: W. B. Yeats: A Critical Introduction. (London: Hutchinson, 1965); Denis Donoghue: Yeats (London: Fontana/Collins, 1971); and Richard F. Peterson: William Butler Yeats (Boston: Twayne, 1982). Of the many general studies, the following have proved valuable: Louis MacNeice: The Poetry of W. B. Yeats (London: Oxford University Press, 1941; Giorgio Melchiori: The Whole Mystery of Art: Pattern into Poetry in the Work of W. B. Yeats (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960); Richard Ellmann: The Identity of Yeats, revised ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964); T. R. Hemn: The Lonely Tower: Studies in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats, revised ed. (London: Methuen, 1965); An Honoured Guest: New Essays on W. B. Yeats, Denis Donoghue & J. R. Mulryne, eds. (London: Arnold, 1965); Harold Bloom: Yeats (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); Douglas N. Archibald: Yeats (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1983); Edward Engelberg: The Vast Design: Patterns in W. B. Yeats’s Aesthetic, revised ed. (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1988); Phillip L. Marcus: Yeats and Artistic Power (London: Macmillan, 1992). Of the several periodicals devoted exclusively to Yeats, two current annuals are the most important: Yeats Annual, Warwick Gould, present editor (London: Macmillan, 1982ff.), and Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies, Richard J. Finneran, ed. (1983ff., presently published Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press).

Noteworthy specialised studies include Frank Kermode: Romantic Image (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957); two books on Yeats and Neoplatonism by F.A.C. Wilson: W. B. Yeats and Tradition and Yeats’s Iconography (both London: Gollancz, 1958, 1960); Donald T. Torchiana: W. B. Yeats and Georgian Ireland (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1966); Mary Helen Thuente: W. B. Yeats and Irish Folklore (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1981); Elizabeth B. Loizeaux: Yeats and the Visual Arts (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986); Patrick J. Keane: Yeats’s Interactions with Tradition (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987); Phillip L. Marcus: Yeats and the Beginning of the Irish Renaissance, 2d ed. (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1987); Frank Kinahan: Yeats, Folklore, and Occultism: Contexts of the Early Work and Thought (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1988); Thomas R. Whitaker: Swan and Shadow: Yeats’s Dialogue with History, 2d ed. (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1989); Joann Gardner: Yeats and the Rhymers’ Club: A Nineties’ Perspective (New York: Lang, 1989); Brian Arkins: Builders of My Soul: Greek and Roman Themes in Yeats (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1990). Postmodernism and poststructuralism have finally caught up with Yeats in Yeats and Postmodernism, Leonard Orr, ed. (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1991).

There are many studies of influences and contacts, of which the following are important: Hazard Adams: Blake and Yeats: The Contrary Vision (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1955); George Bornstein: Yeats and Shelley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); Rupin W. Desai: Yeats’s Shakespeare (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1971); Terence Diggory: Yeats and American Poetry: The Tradition of the Self Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983); Peter Kuch: Yeats and A.E.: ‘The Antagonism That Unites Dear Friends’ (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1986); James Longenbach: Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Ravindran Sankaran: W. B. Yeats and Indian Tradition (Delhi: Konark, 1990); Masaru Sekine & Christopher Murray: Yeats and the Noh: A Comparative Study (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1990); Wayne K. Chapman: Yeats and English Renaissance Literature (London: Macmillan, 1991); Learning the Trade: Essays on W. B. Yeats and Contemporary Poetry, Deborah Fleming, ed. (West Cornwall, Conn.: Locust Hill, 1993); Peter Th. M. G. Liebregts: Centaurs in the Twilight: W. B. Yeats’s Use of the Classical Tradition (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993).

Basic to the study of Yeats’s poetry is A. Norman Jeffares’s A New Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1984). Other useful monographs are Donald A. Stauffer: The Golden Nightingale: Essays on Some Principles of Poetry in the Lyrics of William Butler Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1949); John Unterecker: A Reader’s Guide to William Butler Yeats (New York: Noonday, 1959; two books by Thomas F. Parkinson of 1961 and 1964, republished in one: W. B. Yeats Self-Critic: A Study of His Early Verse, and The Later Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971); B. L. Reid: William Butler Yeats: The Lyric of Tragedy (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961); Robert Beum: The Poetic Art of W. B. Yeats (New York: Ungar, 1969); Colin Meir: The Ballads and Songs of W. B. Yeats: The Anglo-Irish Heritage in Subject and Style (London: Macmillan, 1974); David R. Clark: Yeats at Songs and Choruses (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983); Hazard Adams: The Book of Yeats’s Poems (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1990); Jahan Ramazani: Yeats and the Poetry of Death: Elegy, Self-Elegy, and the Sublime (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990); M. L. Rosenthal: Running to Paradise: Yeats’s Poetic Art, which also discusses most of the plays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Feminist and gender studies are represented by Elizabeth Butler Cullingford: Gender and History in Yeats’s Love Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); deconstructionist approaches by Edward Larrissy: Yeats the Poet: The Measures of Difference (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994).

Studies of Yeats’s plays may begin with A. Norman Jeffares and A. S. Knowland: A Commentary on the Collected Plays of W. B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1975). The pioneer study was Peter Ure’s Yeats the Playwright: A Commentary on Character and Design in the Major Plays (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963). Subsequent publications include Leonard E. Nathan: The Tragic Drama of William Butler Yeats (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965); John Rees Moore: Masks of Love and Death: Yeats as Dramatist (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1971); James W. Flannery: W. B. Yeats and the Idea of a Theatre: The Early Abbey Theatre in Theory and Practice (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976); Richard Taylor: The Drama of W. B. Yeats: Irish Myth and the Japanese No (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976); and A Reader’s Guide to the Plays of W. B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1984); Liam Miller: The Noble Drama of W. B. Yeats (Dublin: Dolmen, 1977); Andrew Parkin: The Dramatic Imagination of W. B. Yeats (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1978); Katharine Worth: The Irish Drama of Europe from Yeats to Beckett (London: Athlone Press, 1978); Anthony Bradley: William Butler Yeats (New York: Ungar, 1979); Karen Dorn: Players and Painted Stage: The Theatre of W. B. Yeats (Brighton: Harvester, 1984); David R. Clark: W. B. Yeats and the Theatre of Desolate Reality, expanded ed. (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1993).

Serious discussions of Yeats’s politics were sparked by Conor Cruise O’Brien’s revisionist essay ‘Passion and Cunning: An Essay on the Politics of W. B. Yeats,’ in Excited Reverie: A Centenary Tribute to William Butler Yeats, A. Norman Jeffares & K. G. W. Cross, eds. (London: Macmillan, 1965). O’Brien’s charge that Yeats was a fascist of sorts was discussed and rebutted by Elizabeth Cullingford: Yeats, Ireland, and Fascism (London: Macmillan, 1981), and by Grattan Freyer: W. B. Yeats and the Anti-Democratic Tradition (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1981). Further accounts of Yeats’s politics can be found in Bernard G. Krimm’s W. B. Yeats and the Emergence of the Irish Free State 1918-1939 (Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1981); and Paul Scott Stanfield’s Yeats and Politics in the 1930s (London: Macmillan, 1988).

The prose fiction is ably dealt with in William H. O’Donnell’s A Guide to the Prose Fiction of W. B. Yeats (Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research, 1983). Treatments of the autobiographical writings include Joseph Ronsley: Yeats’s Autobiography: Life as Symbolic Pattern (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968); Daniel T. O’Hara: Tragic Knowledge: Yeats’s Autobiography and Hermeneutics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981); Shirley C. Neuman: Yeats’s Autobiographical Prose (Mountrath, Portlaoise: Dolmen, 1982); and David G. Wright: Yeats’s Myth of Self: The Autobiographical Prose (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1987). Yeats’s occult interests are the subject of George Mills Harper: Yeats’s Golden Dawn (London: Macmillan, 1974); Yeats and the Occult, George Mills Harper, ed. (Toronto: Macmillan, 1975); James Olney: The Rhizome and the Flower: The Perennial Philosophy - Yeats and Jung (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); Graham Hough: The Mystery Religion of W. B. Yeats (Brighton: Harvester, 1984); and, for the initiated, Kathleen Raine: Yeats the Initiate: Essays on Certain Themes in the Work of W. B. Yeats (Mountrath, Portlaoise: Dolmen/London: Allen & Unwin, 1986).