The Annotated Responsibilities: Errors in the Variorum Edition and a New Reading of the Genesis of Two Poems, “On Those That Hated ‘The Playboy of the Western World’, 1907” and “The New Faces”

Abstract

An annotated copy of one of Yeats’s collections, which has come to light at Washington State University’s Holland Library, allows corrections in the standard editions of Yeats’s poems and plays as well as the standard bibliography upon which these depend.¹ Responsibilities and Other Poems (London: Macmillan, March 1917) proves to be more than a mere “second impression” of the English edition of Responsibilities and Other Poems (1916; Wade 115). Since both the Variorum Poems and Variorum Plays have followed Wade, a number of the variants reported for the poems of Responsibilities and The Green Helmet, the play The Hour-Glass, and the notes for this collection, are errors of oversight. Now that all the materials for detecting these errors are at hand — including the annotated volumes listed in Edward O’Shea’s A Descriptive Catalog of W. B. Yeats’s Library (1985) — we can have a much clearer view of the transmission of Yeats’s texts.