– 67 – A u g u s t 2 0 2 2 “I Have Said All The Good I Know And All The Evil”: Complete Set Of The Six Signed Limited American Editions Of Yeats’ Works, Each One Of Only 250 Copies Signed By Yeats 78. YEATS, William Butler. Later Poems; Plays in Prose and Verse; Plays and Controversies; Essays; Early Poems and Stories; Autobiographies. New York, 1924-27. Six volumes. Octavo, original half blue cloth, custom clamshell boxes. $22,500. Complete set of the six separately issued signed limited American editions of Yeats’ poems, stories, plays, essays, and autobiographies, each volume one of only 250 copies signed by Yeats. An exceptional set, rarely found together and in such beautiful condition. Later Poems contains all of Yeats’ nondramatic poems written between 1899 and 1921, during which he published The Wind among the Reeds, In the Seven Woods, The Green Helmet and Other Poems, The Wild Swans at Coole, Michael Robartes and the Dancer and other works. “One should try to possess all these books… to study the development of the greatest poet of the century… [He developed] a set of ideas and images which glow through the deceptive simplicity of his verse forms and render his lightest song elusively” (Connolly, 41, 24). Essays collects Yeats’ writings on “a wide range of topics, including Irish nationalism, magic and mysticism, Japanese Noh drama... studies of… Shakespeare, William Blake, Percy Shelley and William Morris… As he did with his poems, Yeats took considerable care with the arrangement of his essays for publication” (Finneran & Bornstein, IV:xxiii, xxxvii). Plays in Prose and Verse collects “Cathleen ni Houlihan,” “The Green Helmet,” and nine other plays by Yeats for Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. Plays and Controversies includes the “The Countess Cathleen,” “The Land of Heart’s Desire,” “At the Hawk’s Well,” “The Only Jealousy of Emer,” “The Dreaming of the Bones,” and “Cavalry.” Early Poems and Stories gathers the poems and stories from his early books, including The Celtic Twilight, The Secret Rose, Stories of Red Hanrahan and others. Autobiographies “is the essential companion to the poems and play… that great Romantic achievement: a vision of personal history as art… it shows Yeats at work—summoning his people, realizing his places, making a world” (O’Donnell & Archibald, eds. Autobiographies, 10). It contains two of Yeats’ autobiographical works, Trembling of the Veil (1922) and Reveries over Childhood and Youth (1915), and is illustrated with a frontispiece portrait of Yeats from a drawing by his father and four plates, including mounted color plate of Jack B. Yeats’ “Memory Harbour.” Each volume preceded by the English signed limited editions; each volume published and issued separately, each with different limitation numbers. Without original slipcases, rarely found. Bookplate in Early Poems and Autobiographies. All volumes internally fine, and with only a hint of toning to spines or spine labels. A lovely set, rarely found complete and in such excellent condition.
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