Yeats’s Permanent Self

This volume offers a richly documented account of how W. B. Yeats shaped, revised and republished his work from the beginnings of his literary career, through his often fraught negotiations with rival publishers until 1916, when he committed himself to Macmillan for the eventual publication of his Collected Works. Drawing on extensive archival and bibliographical research, Warwick Gould follows the intertwined histories of Yeats’s individual books—their conception, material forms, publication, reception and continual transformation—to show how the “lives” of books can illuminate the life of a writer.

At the heart of the study is Yeats’s pursuit of what he called his 'permanent self': the desire to fashion an enduring image of himself through his collected works, even as his relentless habit ofrevision continually destabilised that ideal. Examining publishers, editions, bindings, markets, audiences and authorial intentions, Gould reveals the complex material circumstances through which Yeats’s canon emerged. The result is both an absorbing study of one of modern literature’s most self-conscious authors and a distinctive 'biblio-biography' demonstrating how publishing history can transform our understanding of literary identity and textual creation.