Description

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A stunning facsimile of the 1919 first edition of William Butler Yeats’s The Wild Swans at Coole: an elegant volume showcasing these poems as they would have first been read and a complement to facsimile editions The Winding Stair and The Tower.

Published in 1919 during W.B. Yeats’s “middle stage” and composed of poems written during World War I, The Wild Swans at Coole is contemplative and elegiac. This collection captures Yeats at a time when he was looking back on his life, coming to terms with the realities of modern war, reflecting on lost love, and defining his place in the world as a poet. It features forty poems, among them “The Fisherman,” “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory,” “The Wild Swans at Coole,” and “On Being Asked for a War Poem.”

This facsimile of the original 1919 edition presents the reader with the work in its original form, with handsome old fashioned type, how readers and Yeats himself would have seen it in the early twentieth century. A great gift book and collector’s item, The Wild Swans at Coole also includes an Introduction and notes by esteemed Yeats scholar George Bornstein.

About the Author

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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.

George Bornstein wrote five critical books on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. A longtime student of material textuality, he produced several major editions of modernist works, including two volumes on Yeats's early poetry for the Cornell Yeats Series and the collection Under the Moon: Unpublished Early Poetry by W. B. Yeats. He held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation, and served as president of the Society for Textual Scholarship.