The Hour-Glass: Manuscript Materials

by W.B. Yeats

Summary

From reviews of The Cornell Yeats series: "For students of Yeats the whole series is bound to become an essential reference source and a stimulus to important critical re-readings of Yeats's major works. In a wider context, the series will also provide an extraordinary and perhaps unique insight into the creative process of a great artists."-Irish Literary Supplement"I consider the Cornell Yeats one of the most important scholarly projects of our time."-A. Walton Litz, Princeton University, coeditor of The Collected Poems of William Carols Williams and Personae: The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound"The most ambitious of the many important projects in current studies of Yeats and perhaps of modern poetry generally. . . . The list of both general and series editors, as well as prospective preparers of individual volumes, reads like a Who's Who of Yeats textual studies in North America. Further, the project carries the blessing of Yeats's heirs and bespeaks an ongoing commitment from a major university press. . . . The series will inevitably engender critical studies based on a more solid footing than those of any other modern poet. . . . Its volumes will be consulted long after gyres of currently fashionable theory have run on."-Yeats Annual (1983)This volume brings together all extant manuscripts of The Hour-Glass, from a handwritten three-page fragment of the 1902 prose version to Yeats's typescripts of the 1922 verse rendition.Based on a folktale called "The Priest's Soul," which Yeats first encountered in 1888, The Hour-Glass was written as both a play in prose and a drama in verse over the course of more than thirty years. This volume brings together all extant manuscripts of The Hour-Glass, from a handwritten three-page fragment of the 1902 prose version to Yeats's typescripts of the 1922 verse rendition