Rare Books at Marlborough: An A to Z
Yeats
One of four Irish writers to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) was an acclaimed author of poetry, prose and drama in the late 19th and first half of the 20th centuries.
His work was deeply admired by Marlborough’s greatest Irish poet, Louis MacNeice, who freely acknowledged his influence. Indeed, MacNeice, who met Yeats in Dublin in 1934, wrote the most important early survey of his compatriot’s work, The Poetry of W. B. Yeats, which was published in 1939. MacNeice was not the only Marlburian poet personally acquainted with Yeats: the photograph reproduced here shows Yeats in the company of Siegfried Sassoon in the Red Room of Garsington Manor, Oxfordshire, in September 1920. A curio among the College Rare Books is a copy of Yeats’s Collected Poems published by Macmillan in a handsome two-volume set bound in green buckram and signed by the poet in a small, neat hand. What is odd is that the book was published in 1949, ten years after Yeats’s death. The explanation for this apparent posthumous signing is that
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Macmillan had asked Yeats to sign 375 so-called limitation sheets in 1938 in preparation for a variorum edition of his poems, but the project stalled, first on account of Yeats’s death in January 1939, and then because of the outbreak of the Second World War. It was only at the end of the following decade, when economic conditions were more conducive for the sale of limited edition books, that the sheets were brought out of storage and work on the project resumed. The College also holds some attractive examples of the graphic productions of Yeats’s younger brother, Jack B. Yeats (1871–1957), also a playwright and poet, but chiefly remembered as one of Ireland’s most distinguished artists. Reproduced here are images from his Broadside Ballads (1909) and Life in the West of Ireland (1912), both typical of Jack B. Yeats’s economical execution and characterful style.
