The Textual Condition

W. David Soud, Divine Cartographies: God, History and Poeisis in W. B. Yeats, David Jones, and T. S. Eliot

“…Gesturing to 'a storm of scholarly dispute' after the appearance of The Poems: a New Edition (1983), McGann devoted a couple of pages of The Textual Condition (1991) to the 'notorious case of Yeats' as an example to 'indicate how and why to concept "author's (final) intentions)" cannot be used to determine copytext', concluding 'Suffice it to say that no one editing Yeats, given the state of the archive as it is presently known, could use "author's (final) intentions" as the determinative criterion for deciding on copy-text for many, perhaps most, of the poems, and especially the so-called Last Poems', says McGann, warily gesturing to Richard Finneran's accompanying volume, Editing Yeats's Poems. 95 'Final intention'-rightly in my view-had been Finneran's criterion in his choice of principal copy-text, even if-disastrouslyhe had failed to see that the Collected Poems was a stop-gap, a 'radial development' (to use McGann's term 96 ) of Yeats's larger publishing programme during the Depression. Mrs Yeats and Thomas Mark had left plenty of evidence that the decision to end the Last Poems volume-unit with 'Under Ben Bulben' was her decision on his suggestion, despite Yeats's placement of the poem at the beginning of Last Poems and Two Plays.…”

“…98 Lady Gregory, however, thought that the printers (and Lennox Robinson's previous failed outlet, the Nation) had objected not to his beliefs but to 'his way of supporting it', and told George Yeats that it would be hardly necessary to display the immortality of the soul. She, though she didn't support me when I told him so-is sorry Willie is writing 95 On the embedded quotations from Yeats's work, see above 165-66, nn. 91 for them, says everyone will recognise the manifesto as his though he doesn't believe they will, and that he has given them his Leda poem and a fine thing among his other poems in [The Cat and the Moon 1924] but is, now it is known it goes into Tomorrow, being spoken of as something horribly indecent.…”

“…Yeats's iambic description of bastardry among the beggarclasses in Purgatory may be reminiscent of such lines as the aspersions cast on the parentage of Apemantus by Timon of Athens: 'thy father (that poor rag) | …, who in spite put stuff | To some she-beggar and compounded thee | Poor rogue hereditary' (IV.iii.274-77), or perhaps more faintly of Autolycus' less than flattering description of himself as a libidinous wandering tradesman in The Winter's Tale: 'he … married a tinker's wife within a mile where my land and living lies; and, having flown over many knavish professions, he settled only in rogue' (IV.iii. [95][96][97][98]. That late romance, in particular, seems like a highly appropriate intertext.…”

“…Bloom shows that 'radio played a pivotal role as a medium through which Yeats performed, publicised, and published poetry at the end of his life', and argues that 'his interpretation of this new entity, the broadcast audience, was an active influence in shaping the auditory poetics of his late lyrics' (29). Through his radiogenic poetry, Yeats 'not only redefined his publication speaking for major broadcasts when magnetic tape became available for recording purposes, enabling staff to cut and edit broadcasts (95). Bowen had a deep interest in radio's perceived ties to the occult, and her wartime radio features, in which she summons the ghosts of Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope and Fanny Burney, reveal that she perceived radio as 'an irresistible opportunity to resurrect authorial spirits', by staging 'ghostly visitors who chastise, correct, or disrupt the expectations of their living readers' (96).…”

The Textual History of Yeats’s On the Boiler

“…94 92 Cf., Yeats's lines from ' This passage is best read as an act of homage to Yeats's table talk, to his poems, to the yet-to-be published A Vision (1925), to the Blake he regularly quoted ('The Holy Spirit is an intellectual fountain'), to his denunciation of atheist Bishops, and, in that final phrase about 'the imperishable substance of the stars' again to the Blake essays, to 'Father Christian Rosencrux', Rosa Alchemica, and The Unicorn from the Stars. 95 Context in such a journal is mutual reinforcement. In To-Morrow, everything pulled in the direction of rebellion.…”