Tower 1928

Introduction A last-minute shopper entering a London bookstore on Valentine's Day in 1928 with six shillings to spend on a gift for his or her beloved could hardly have made a better investment -- either poetically or financially -- than one of the 2,000 copies of a volume Macmillan & Co. had published that morning: The Tower by W. B. Yeats. Twenty-one poems in 104 pages; six pages of notes; olive green cloth with a design by T. Sturge Moore stamped in gold on front and spine, also reproduced on the dust jacket. No illustrations, no book club dividends: simply one of the seminal volumes of Modern Poetry, indeed of poetry in English as we know it. Doubtless not every lyric is a masterpiece, but how often have we been given between two covers such "monuments of magnificence" as "Sailing to Byzantium," "Leda and the Swan," and "Among School Children" -- not to mention "The Tower," "Meditations in Time of Civil War," "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen," or "Two Songs from a Play"? "A thing never known again," indeed.The gestation of The Tower was a long process. A draft of "The New Faces" was sent to Lady Gregory on 7 December 1912; a draft of "From 'Oedipus at Colonus'" was sent to Olivia Shakespear on 13 March 1927. Yeats began to publish the poems that would form The Tower in journals as early as March 1921 and in book form the following year: Seven Poems and a Fragment, an edition of only 500 copies by the Cuala Press, the private press run by his sisters. Two more Cuala Press volumes would follow -- The Cat and the Moon and Certain Poems (1924), again in a printing of only 500 copies; and October Blast (1927), one of the rarest of all Cuala publications, only 350 copies. The single poem in The Tower not previously published would be "Colonus' Praise." Finally, on 16 September 1927, Yeats submitted copy for the volume to Macmillan: I send you...the manuscript of 'The Tower.' Feeling that it was exaggerated in certain directions I continually put off sending it, but I cannot delay any longer. If, when you have received the Manuscript, you think the book too small, or have any fault to find, please delay it for a few months. Yeats went on to explain that he was writing a series of poems for a limited American edition (The Winding Stair, 1929) and that these could be added to The Tower in a year. Seldom has a Nobel Laureate been quite so diffident about his latest work.Although the Cuala Press Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921) had been included in Later Poems (1922), Macmillan had not published a major new volume of Yeats's poetry since The Wild Swans at Coole (1919). It is thus not surprising that the publisher gave little heed to Yeats's reservations about The Tower and instead put the book into production, with publication on 14 February 1928. The volume quickly sold out, and a second impression was issued in March. In July 1929 Macmillan published a third impression with some corrections. An edition by Macmillan, New York, appeared on 22 May 1928, with a second impression in January 1929.As usual, Yeats treated The Tower as a unique work, not simply a collection of poems. The order of the poems was anything but chronological, either in terms of composition or of the events depicted. For instance, the second poem written and the first published, "All Souls' Night," was placed last. "Meditations in Time of Civil War," describing the violence in Ireland of 1922-23, precedes "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen." A poem that concludes with the story of Christ, "Two Songs from a Play," is followed by one that describes the union of Leda and Zeus.Yeats's interest in The Tower as a separate work of art extended to the physical book itself. Once the arrangements for the volume had been made with Macmillan, he enlisted his friend T. Sturge Moore, a writer and aYeats, W. B. is the author of 'Tower 1928', published 2004 under ISBN 9780743247283 and ISBN 0743247280.