Essays in Honour of Eamonn Cantwell: Yeats Annual No. 20

The admirable Yeats Annual... a powerful base of biographical and textual knowledge. Since 1982 the vade mecum of Yeats.

—Bernard O'Donoghue, The Times Literary Supplement

This number of Yeats Annual collects the essays resulting from the University College Cork/ESB International Annual W. B. Yeats Lectures Series (2003-2008) by Roy Foster, Warwick Gould, John Kelly, Paul Muldoon, Bernard O’Donoghue and Helen Vendler. Those that were available in pamphlet form are now collectors’ items, but here is the complete series.

These revised essays cover such themes as Yeats and the Refrain, Yeats as a Love Poet, Yeats, Ireland and Europe, the puzzles he created and solved with his art of poetic sequences, and his long and crucial interaction with the emerging T. S. Eliot. The series was inaugurated by a study of Yeats and his Books, which marked the gift to the Boole Library, Cork, of Dr Eamonn Cantwell’s collection of rare editions of books by Yeats (here catalogued by Crónán Ó Doibhlin). Many of the volume’s fifty-six plates offer images of artists’ designs and resulting first editions.

This bibliographical theme is continued with Colin Smythe’s census of surviving copies of Yeats’s earliest separate publication, Mosada (1886) and a resultant piece by Warwick Gould on that dramatic poem’s source in the legend of The Phantom Ship. John Kelly reveals Yeats’s ghost-writing for Sarah Allgood; Geert Lernout discovers the source for Yeats’s ‘Tulka’, Günther Schmigalle unearths his surprising connexions with American communist colonists in Virginia, while Deirdre Toomey edits some new letters to the French anarchist, Auguste Hamon—all providing new annotation for standard editions. The volume is rounded with review essays by Colin McDowell (on A Vision, and Berkeley, Hone and Yeats), shorter reviews of current studies by Michael Edwards, Jad Adams and Deirdre Toomey, and obituaries of Jon Stallworthy (Nicolas Barker) and Katharine Worth (Richard Cave).

Yeats Annual is published by Open Book Publishers in association with the Institute of English Studies, University of London. Further details, including how to order back issues, can be found at:

http://www.ies.sas.ac.uk/publications/yeats-annual

Essays in Honour of Eamonn Cantwell: Yeats Annual No. 20
Edited by Warwick Gould | December 2016
510 | 56 colour illustration | 5.5'' x 8.5'' (216 x 140 mm)
Yeats Annual, vol. 20 | ISSN: 0278-7687 (Print); 2054-3611 (Online)
ISBN Paperback: 9781783741779
ISBN Hardback: 9781783741786
ISBN Digital (PDF): 9781783741793
ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 9781783741809
ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 9781783741816
DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0081
BIC subject codes: DSC (Literary studies: poetry & poets); BISAC: LIT014000 (Literary criticism: Poetry), LIT004120 (Literary criticism: English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh)

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Jad Adams is an historian working as an author and an independent television producer. He specializes on radical characters from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the Decadence of the 1890s. His books include biographies of Tony Benn, Gandhi, Emmeline Pankhurst and of the Nehru dynasty. His literary work includes a biography of Kipling, Madder Music, Stronger Wine: The Life of Ernest Dowson (2000) and Hideous Absinthe: History of the Devil in a Bottle (2004). His television work includes biographies of Kitchener, Bill and Hillary Clinton and of characters from London’s East End. He is an Associate Research Fellow of the Institute of English Studies, University of London.

Nicolas Barker OBE, FBA succeeded John Hayward as Editor of The Book Collector (founded in 1952 by Ian Fleming) in 1965, and edited it until 2016. He has been a publisher with Rupert Hart-Davis and Macmillan, a Keeper at the National Portrait Gallery and the British Library, a Sandars Reader in Bibliography at Cambridge, a Panizzi Lecturer at the British Library, and is a Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of English Studies, University of London. Notable among his prolific stream of studies and editions in all fields of Bibliography is his application of the methods of John Carter and Pollard in investigating the forgeries of Thomas J. Wise (a study which he edited and to which he co-wrote a sequel) to the forgeries by Frederic Prokosh: see his The Butterfly Books: An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Twentieth Century Pamphlets (1987).

Richard Allen Cave is Emeritus Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has published extensively on Irish theatre, and edited the manuscripts of The King of the Great Clock Tower and A Full Moon in March (2007). His Collaborations: Ninette de Valois and W. B. Yeats appeared in 2008.

Michael Edwards is Professor of Classics and Head of the Department of Humanities at the University of Roehampton, London. He was formerly in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary, University of London, Director of the Institute of Classical Studies, and Head of Classics at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. He is the President of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric. He has published widely on classical Greek oratory, including commentaries on speeches of Antiphon, Andocides, and Lysias, and a translation of the speeches of Isaeus. Professor Edwards was recently a co-editor of a three-volume edition of the Latin poet Statius (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007) and he is currently working on an Oxford Classical Text of Isaeus and a commentary on Aeschines, Against Ctesiphon.

R. F. Foster FBA, FRSL, FRHS, MRHA retires this year from the Carroll Chair of Irish History at Hertford College, in the University of Oxford, a post founded for him in 1991. His books include Charles Stewart Parnell: The Man and His Family (1976), Lord Randolph Churchill: A Political Life (1981), Modern Ireland 1600–1972 (1988), The Oxford Illustrated History of Ireland (1989), The Sub Prefect Should Have Held His Tongue: Selected Essays of Hubert Butler (1990), Paddy and Mr Punch: Connections in Irish and English History (1993), The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland (2001), W. B. Yeats, A Life. I: The Apprentice Mage 1865–1914 (1997) and II: The Arch-Poet, 1915–1939 (2003); Conquering England: The Irish in the Victorian Metropolis (2005), co-written with Fintan Cullen, Luck and the Irish: a brief history of change 1970–2000 (2006), Words Alone: Yeats and his inheritances (2011), derived from his Clark Lectures at the University of Cambridge; and Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland (2014), based on the Ford Lectures which he delivered at Oxford in 2012. He is also a well-known critic, reviewer and broadcaster. Email: Roy.Foster@hertford.ox.ac.uk

Warwick Gould FRSL, FRSA, FEA is Emeritus Professor of English Literature in the University of London (at Royal Holloway), and Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of English Studies (in the School of Advanced Study), of which he was Founder-Director 1999–2013. He is co-author of Joachim of Fiore and the Myth of the Eternal Evangel in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1988, revised 2001), and co-editor of The Secret Rose, Stories by W. B. Yeats: A Variorum Edition (1981, revised 1992), The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, Volume II, 1896–1900 (1997), and Mythologies (2005). He has edited Yeats Annual for thirty years. Email: Warwick.Gould@sas.ac.uk

John Kelly is an Emeritus Research Fellow at St John’s College, Oxford, and the Donald Keough Professor in Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He taught English and Irish Literature at the University of Oxford from 1976 to 2009, and has written extensively on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. He is General Editor of The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, Volume 4 (2005) of which was awarded the Cohen Prize by the Modern Languages Association, and has also edited and introduced a 12-volume series of Irish fiction, poetry and essays of the nineteenth century, under the title Hibernia: State and Nation. His W. B. Yeats Chronology appeared in 2003.

Geert Lernout is an Emeritus Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Antwerp. His books in English include The French Joyce (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), The Poet as Thinker: Hölderlin in France (1994) and Help My Unbelief: James Joyce and Religion (2010). With Vincent Deane and Daniel Ferrer he edited twelve of Joyce’s Buffalo Notebooks for Finnegans Wake and with Wim Van Mierlo two volumes on the European reception of Joyce’s work. His scholarly articles are mostly in the fields of comparative literature and editorial theory. He is a member of the Academia Europaea and President of the International James Joyce Foundation. Email: geert.lernout@uantwerpen.be

Colin McDowell retired several years ago after what he describes as ‘a long and undistinguished career in the Australian Public Service’, during which he has been the mainstay of this journal’s commitment to ‘Mastering what is most abstract’ in A Vision,with numerous closely-observed elucidations of its system and its textual puzzles. He continues to read widely, review questioningly, and to write essays on Yeats. Email: colin.richard.mcdowell@gmail.com

Paul Muldoon FRSL, Poet and Howard G. B. Clark ’21 Chair of the Humanities, Princeton University, is also an editor, critic and translator. His collections of poetry include New Weather (1973), Mules (1977), Why Brownlee Left (1980), Quoof (1983), Meeting the British (1987), Madoc: A Mystery (1990), The Annals of Chile (1994), Hay (1998), Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), Horse Latitudes (2006), Maggot (2010), and One Thousand Things Worth Knowing (2015). He was Professor of Poetry at Oxford University 1990–2004, and has been poetry editor of The New Yorker since 2007. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Pulitzer Prize winner, he has also won the American Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature, the T. S. Eliot Prize (1994), the Irish Times Poetry Prize (1997), the Griffin International Prize for Excellence in Poetry (2003), the American Ireland Fund Literary Award (2004), the Shakespeare Prize (2004), the Aspen Prize for Poetry (2005), and the European Prize for Poetry (2006).

Bernard O’Donoghue FRSLis a noted Irish poet and Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford. His books include his translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, his collection, The Courtly Love Tradition (1982), Seamus Heaney and the Language of Poetry (1995), and his edited Oxford Irish Quotations (1999). His poetry collections include Poaching Rights (1987), The Absent Signifier (1990), The Weakness (1991), Gunpowder (1995, which won the Whitbread Prize for Poetry), Here Nor There (1999), Poaching Rights (1999), Outliving (2003), Selected Poems (2008) and Farmers Cross (2011). He is an editor of the distinguished Oxford Poets imprint of Carcanet Press, and the senior member of the Oxford University Poetry Society. Email: bernard.odonoghue@wadh.ox.ac.uk

Crónán Ó Doibhlin is Head of Research Collections and Communications in the Boole Library, Coláiste na hOllscoile Corcaigh (University College, Cork, now known as a constituent University of the National University of Ireland system). 

Günther Schmigalle, now retired, was a librarian at the Badische Landesbibliothek, Karlsruhe, Germany. He was also for some years (1988–94) a professor of literature and library science at the Universidad Centroamericana, Managua, Nicaragua. He has written about the literature of the Spanish Civil War (Malraux, Hemingway, Arthur Koestler) and has published critical editions of the prose works of Rubén Darío. Email: schmigalle2000@yahoo.de

Colin Smythe is presently working on a new bibliography of W. B. Yeats, correcting, enlarging and updating that by Alan Wade (3rd ed., 1968). He is General Editor of his publishing company’s Irish Literary Studies Series (53 titles), and (with the late T. R. Henn) the Coole Edition of Lady Gregory’s Works (15 volumes so far published, and with Early Irish Writings 1883–1893,edited by James Pethica, due shortly as the 16th: that volume will include ‘An Emigrant’s Note Book’, the Angus Grey’ stories, and ‘A Phantom’s Pilgrimage’.) With Henry Summerfield, Dr Smythe is co-General Editor the Collected Works of G.W. Russell (AE), of which four volumes are now published. He is also the late Sir Terry Pratchett’s literary agent (and first publisher). He received a Hon. LLD from Dublin University for services to Irish Literature in 1998. Email: cpsmythe@aol.com

Deirdre Toomey is editor of Yeats and Women: Yeats Annual No. 9 (1991), revised and augmented as Yeats and Women (1997). She is co-editor of The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, Volume II, 1896–1900 (1997) and Mythologies (2005). She is working with Warwick Gould on a complete revision of A. Norman Jeffares’s A New Commentary on the Poems of Yeats and is Research Editor of Yeats Annual. Email: yeatsresearch@sas.ac.uk

Helen Vendler is A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University. Among her many books are Yeats’s Vision and the Later Plays (1963), Poets Thinking, Coming of Age as a Poet, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets,and Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (2007). Her latest book is The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar: Essays on Poets and Poetry (2015). Email: vendler@fas.harvard.edu

© 2016 Warwick Gould. Copyright of individual chapters is maintained by the chapters’ authors



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