The “Yeats and Ireland Collection” at Wake Forest University

Abstract

Wake Forest University’s “Yeats and Ireland Collection” was started without fanfare or design. When we announced, for the 1964–5 academic year, our first advanced course in the poetry of Yeats, we realised that, except for trade editions of his poems and plays, some collections of his prose, and routinely available works of biography and criticism, we had no library support for an upper-division undergraduate course, let alone some possible future graduate course. Nor, beyond a few casually purchased volumes, did our library have necessary books by and about other Irish writers of the period. We acquired such early works as The Wanderings of Oisin (1889), The Countess Kathleen (1892), and Cathleen ni Hoolihan (1902). We also started, rather systematically, to buy Dun Emer and Cuala Press editions: The Bounty of Sweden and Seven Poems and a Fragment, added in 1966, were the first. During the intervening years we have acquired copies of all the books regularly published by the Dun Emer Press and the Cuala Press, as well as the three series of A Broadside and some of the privately printed books and booklets, including three volumes of Yeats’s poems which were prepared, not for sale, in editions of only fifty copies: Poems Written in Discouragement (1913), The Hour Glass (1914) and Mosada (1943).