Yeats in His Letters: a Review Essay John Kelly (ed.) and Eric Domville (assoc. ed.), The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, Volume 1: 1865–1895

Abstract

This long-awaited first volume of the collected edition of Yeats’s correspondence is an outstanding achievement. That the editorial task has taken so long is really not surprising, given the voluminous amount of material and the daunting process of locating, deciphering, dating and annotating that material. Archives and private collections on five continents have been searched, with results far beyond those anticipated. When complete, the Collected Letters is expected to run to at least twelve volumes and to contain nearly 7000 letters, eight times the number included in Allan Wade’s edition of 1954. Letters are still coming to light, as witnessed by the two that turned up too late for inclusion in the text of this first volume and had to be relegated to the end of the book.