Content area
Full Text
Words for Music Perhaps W. B. Yeats. Words for Music Perhaps: Manuscript Materials. David R. Clark, ed. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. xlviii + 626 pp. $72.50
W. B. YEATS'S Words for Music Perhaps was published in 1932 by the Cuala Press. It included 22 independent poems and a further set of 24 poems collected under the title "Words for Music Perhaps." Some of the poems had seen previous publication in the years 1929-1931. The drafts of these 46 poems are the subject of the volume under review. David R. Clark, the editor, has added two other poems; one is "Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop," which became part of the "Words for Music Perhaps" section when the whole collection was merged with the poems in The Winding Stair (1929) to become The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933). The drafts and manuscripts of the poems in the 1929 Winding Stair volume are published in a separate volume of the Cornell Yeats series, also edited by David R. Clark (1995). The second additional poem is "Crazy Jane on the King," which exists only in form of several drafts and was not published during Yeats's lifetime.
Clark reproduces almost all manuscript and several typescript versions in photo-facsimile; facing these are the results of his heroic labors, the transcriptions. The transcriptions do not always render faithfully what one can see in the facsimiles; Clark points out that often he had to employ what he calls "interpretive 'translation'" because of Yeats's difficult and abbreviated handwriting. Of every poem, the several versions (or more precisely, the different versions in various manuscripts) are given in the chronological order of the manuscripts, the last being the one closest to the Cuala version...