Last Poems

Abstract

Curtis bradford in ‘Yeats’s Last Poems Again’, VIII, Dolmen Press Yeats Centenary Papers (1965) wrote that those poems in CP starting with ‘ The Gyres ‘ and ending with ‘Are You Content?’ are Yeats’s New Poems, as published by the Cuala Press in 1938. He points out that the heading Last Poems can be properly applied only to those poems Yeats wrote or finished in the last year of his life. They were published in Last Poems and Two Plays in the order he intended by the Cuala Press in 1939. Curtis Bradford reproduces the order of Yeats’s manuscript list as follows: 1. ‘Under Ben Bulben’; 2. ‘Three Songs to One Burden’; 3. ‘The Black Tower’; 4. ‘Cuchulain Comforted’; 5. ‘Three Marching Songs’; 6. ‘In Tara’s Halls’; 7. ‘The Statues’; 8. ‘News for the Delphic Oracle’; 9. ‘The Long-Legged Fly’; 10. ‘A Bronze Head’; 11. ‘A Stick of Incense’; 12. ‘Hound Voice’; 13. ‘John Kin-sella’s Lament etc’; 14. ‘High Talk’; 15. ‘The Apparitions’; 16. ‘A Nativity’; 17. ‘Man and Echo’; 18. ‘The Circus Animal’s Desertion’; 19. ‘Politics’; 20. ‘Cuchulain’s Death’; 21. ‘Purgatory’. The list does not include three poems Yeats included in OTB: ‘Why should not old Men be Mad?’, ‘Crazy Jane on the Mountain’ and ‘The Statesman’s Holiday’.