Collaborative Revision: Thomas Mark and George Yeats, 1939–49

Abstract

Yeats died on 28 January 1939. He had not been long in his temporary resting-place at Roquebrune before the process began of — not to put too fine a point on it — corrupting the texts which he had worked so hard to perfect. The defects in Poems (1949) which we have so far noted can essentially be traced to the original fatal decision to prefer the proofs of the Edition de Luxe over the Collected Poems. But we now enter a realm where even the best of intentions were sometimes compromised and where, sadly, Yeats’s own judgment was occasionally disregarded. In this chapter I shall describe that process in a general way and illustrate it principally by its effect on the Collected Poems, reserving its consequences for the post-1933 collections until we take up those volumes in turn.