WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS and the UNC COLLECTION

William Butler Yeats was born in a suburb of Dublin in 1865, the first child in a family that would make remarkable contributions to Irish literature, art, and culture over the next seventy-five years. Yeats's father (John Butler Yeats) and his brother (Jack Butler Yeats) became artists of very considerable distinction; his sisters (Elizabeth and Susan) made significant contributions through their participation in the Dun Emer/Cuala Press; and Yeats himself, of course, became Ireland's most important poet and the leader of the Irish literary revival of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.

Following a childhood divided between homes in London and Ireland and a brief attempt to become an artist like his father, the young William Butler Yeats settled determinedly into the career of a poet. His first poems appeared in the Dublin University Review in 1885, and he spent the next fifteen years in London, Dublin, and the west of Ireland (his beloved Sligo) developing his poetic skills and vision. Under the influence of Irish patriots like John O'Leary and friends such as Katherine Tynan and George Russell (known as AE), he explored Irish folklore, mythology and history, nurturing an inclination towards an Irish nationalism, perhaps more literary and cultural than political, that would color much of his later work. In the late 1880s he discovered Theosophy and developed a deep and life-long interest in magic, mysticism, and the occult. During this same period he met and fell in love with Maud Gonne, a beautiful and passionately nationalistic young Irish woman. His long and unrequited love for Gonne would find expression in many of his most striking poems over the following decades.

With the publication of several collections of Irish folk tales and verse, an edition of the works of William Blake, and nearly a dozen volumes of his own poetry and other writings, Yeats had emerged by 1900 as one of the leading Anglo-Irish literary figures. During the first decade of the new century, he turned much of his energy to drama and the development of a national theater in Ireland. Working with Lady Isabella Augusta Gregory (another of the influential women in his life) and others, he helped found and subsequently direct the great Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Performing plays by Yeats, John Millington Synge, Sean O'Casey, and other Irish writers, the Abbey Theatre became one of the chief instruments in the cultural explosion at the turn of the century known as the Irish Literary Renaissance. Through his leadership in the Abbey Theatre, his own plays, and his output as a poet, Yeats's reputation continued to grow through the first two decades of the century. So considerable was his stature among his fellow countrymen that he was named to the new senate following the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922. He would serve there for six years. In recognition of his international literary eminence, the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.

In 1917 Yeats married Georgie Hyde-Lees. Georgie, or George as she preferred to be called, supported and influenced her husband's work in many ways but perhaps none more fascinating to students of Yeats today than her experiences with automatic writing. She had been interested in the occult for some years and, shortly after their marriage, began to receive spiritual communications through the medium of automatic writing. Yeats found the ideas emerging from these communications both a source of new poetic metaphors and an inspiration for the development and elaboration of his philosophical and spiritual system. He incorporated the emerging synthesis into his 1925 work, A Vision, a difficult prose work in which the poet sought to lay out an integrated spiritual view or vision of life.

Yeats was constantly creating himself anew, and his mature years were marked, not by literary decline, but by a new flourishing of his poetic imagination, most notably in his collections The Tower (1928) and the closely related The Winding Staircase (1933), which contain some of his finest poems. He continued to write new poetry and to revise older material to the end of his life. He died in the south of France on January 28, 1939.

Although remembered best as a poet and dramatist, Yeats's contributions were wide-ranging and his work as essayist, editor, folklorist, and short story writer was also important. The Yeats Collection developed by Professor Harper and now at UNC provides an unusually rich documentation of all of these activities. Approximately 370 of the 1,200 volumes in the collection are by Yeats himself or contain his contributions. Many of the Dun Emer/Cuala Press imprints are also editions of Yeats. While many of these books are, as one might expect, first editions, there are also a great many bibliographic variants, including limited editions, signed or inscribed copies, special paper copies, and later editions or printings. Some of the books are relatively common; others are exceedingly rare. Among the latter are Poems (London, 1895; one of twenty-five copies), Tables of the Law (Privately Printed, 1897), Poems Written in Discouragement (Cuala Press, 1913), and The Hour Glass (Cuala Press, 1914). The rarest piece in the collection is undoubtedly the first edition of Yeats's On the Boiler (Cuala Press, 1938) of which only four copies survive. One of the most interesting (as well as rare) is the poet's Eight Poems (London, 1916), a publication Yeats never liked nor sanctioned. The UNC copy carries an inscription by Yeats on the front cover vehemently denying any part in the publication of what he calls "this pretentious pamphlet."

The collection also has more than four hundred issues of periodicals with contributions by or material about Yeats. These include nineteen issues of the Dublin University Review from 1885 to 1887, which contain many of the poet's earliest published writings. The collection has copies of three periodicals related to the Abbey Theatre and edited by Yeats: The Beltaine, Samhain, and The Arrow. It also contains an abundance of other journals to which he contributed, notably The Bookman, The Dial, The Dome, The Green Sheaf, The London Mercury, Lucifer, The Savoy, The Shanachie, and others. While periodical appearances may have less interest to some collectors, Professor Harper recognized their vital importance to a comprehensive research collection. The periodical publication of a poem (or other piece) frequently represents the first appearance of the text in print. As Yeats was rarely satisfied with his writings and continually revised them, the periodical versions often contain texts different (sometimes substantially) from those in subsequent book editions.

Finally, the collection contains over 300 secondary works, from early critical writings to recent scholarly publications and reference works. The presence of these secondary materials within the collection will greatly aid students and scholars in their use of the primary works and periodicals. No collection is ever complete, and the Rare Book Collection intends to continue developing this splendid new acquisition, filling in gaps among the primary materials and adding the best in modern Yeats scholarship. Since the arrival of Professor Harper's collection in July 1999, we have already acquired a number of new editions of Yeats, notably a fine copy of the first edition of his Land of Heart's Desire (London, 1894) with its wonderful cover illustration by Aubrey Beardsley. In an effort to provide a better documentation of the literary world in which Yeats lived and worked, we are also trying to expand our holdings of first and other important editions of related writers, including Synge, O'Casey, George Russell (AE), and Lady Gregory.

The new Yeats Collection in the Rare Book Collection will serve as a vitally important anchor for our emerging strength in Anglo-Irish literature of the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. With the Archibald Henderson Collection of G. Bernard Shaw, the Henry Pearson Collection of Seamus Heaney, and our existing (and still growing) strength in the writings of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, we already have a substantial base. With the addition of this splendid new Yeats Collection, the Rare Book Collection at UNC has the potential of becoming a major international resource for the study of Anglo-Irish literature.