Contextualising the Lyric Moment: Yeats’s “The Happy Townland” and the Abandoned Play The Country of the Young

Abstract

Current debate over the appropriate contents and arrangement of Yeats’s collected poems has served to re-emphasise the elasticity of the boundaries between lyrical, dramatic and narrative forms in his writing.¹ While his selective reconstitution, as independent lyrics, of songs and verses originally written or first published in the context of plays or stories, and his division of Collected Poems (1933) into the separate categories “Lyrical” and “Narrative and Dramatic”, pose difficult editorial choices in the construction of a “canonical” edition of the poems, for Yeats himself exploration of the connections between lyric works and larger dramatic or narrative contexts was clearly both a necessary and an imaginatively invigorating process. From The Wanderings of Oisin (subtitled “Dramatic Sketches, Ballads & Lyrics” in the 1892 edition) through to late volumes such as A Full Moon in March (1935), his preferred manner for first publication of new groups of poems was in conjunction with a play or plays. It would be easy to dismiss such conjunctions as arising predominantly from Yeats’s need to “pad out” short collections of verse to commercial length, but volumes such as The Cat and the Moon (1924) and The King of the Great Clock Tower (1934), in which the new play precedes new poems, suggest that these combinations followed no simple hierarchical pattern and that Yeats considered the sequencing of poem-play collections as carefully for effect as collections of poems alone.