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W. B. Yeats: Complete Poems
| Biographical details: The text given here is that of Richard Finneran’s edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats [3rd edn.] (London: Macmillan 1983, 1984, &c.), xxv, 747pp., 8°; hb. [cover-title, “W. B. Yeats: The Poems: Revised”], which was issued alongside his Editing Yeats’s Poems: A Reconsideration (1983). Finneran controversially followed the order of 1933 Edn. managed by Yeats himself, with sections on lyrical, narrative, and dramatic poems rather than chronological order of the original collections which was adopted by the long-standard Macmillan edition of 1950. Finneran also included poems rejected from the canon by Yeats himself - if the Macmillan 1950 edition based on his own preparations, be taken as the canon. Note that A. N. Jeffares keyed his New Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats (Macmillan 1984) into Finneran's edition as well as to Macmillan edition of the Collected Poems (1950) which was the basis of his earlier Commentary on the Poem of W. B. Yeats published in 1968. |
| The order of the poems given here is alpabetical by title - omitting the definite article from the count - with the dates of composition and first publication appended to each. The digital text employed here was available accessible Toronto University Library during the 1990s when this record was created. The copy of the printed original in any version is imperfect due to problems arising from scanning and editing in this latter-day electronic format. For instance, stanza-breaks in longer poems have frequently been omitted or misplaced and a superfluous line-break often appears reflecing the printing strictures of the original but not the form of the stanza itself. (Both kinds of break appears as <br> in the digital edition.) In contrast to the printed editions. |
| Though not an edition Yeats’s Poems in the proper sense, the digital version does however permit electronic searching for single words or parts of works, phrases, and so on, using the “Find” command in any HTML browser (Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, GNU Firefox, Apple Safari, &c.). This operation is best conducted in Complete Poems: A-Z, a file of 576KB - and hence slow to view on any personal computer. For ordinary reading and browsing purposes, the smaller files into which the entire alphabetical corpus has been broken here is certainly more manageable given, of course, that the reader knows the title or is prepared to search each of the 10 successive files in turn for a given word or phrase. There are inevitably some slight differences in the editing format of longer and short versions but generally consistency has been striven for at the expense of a simpler format - for instance, no special font for titles and not separate tables (i.e., text-boxes) for individual poems. (In fact the paragraph marker <p> has been omitted in favour of double-break <br><br> thoroughout.) |
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