New Poems, the last book that Yeats published in his lifetime, contains 35 poems, including "Lapis Lazuli," "The Municipal Gallery Re-visited," and "The Gyres." It is a volume in which Yeats attempted to make a fresh beginning. In language fueled by rage and frustration, the poems in this collection traverse emotions stimulated by Yeats' feelings toward women, his travels to Majorca, and political ideas inspired or provoked by Charles Parnell, Roger Casement, and Oliver Cromwell. "New Poems," write the editors, "has the newness of discovery in a vortex of exhaustion, desire, and calculation... The sense of a renewal in the eighth decade of Yeats' life was precarious and, when it came, especially poignant." The materials gathered here reveal the process by which Yeats wrote individual poems, established relations among them, and considered their possible placement in the collection. Photographs of drafts, stanzas floating within-but not trapped by-the margins of loose-leaf pages, in Yeats' characteristically illegible hand, are accompanied by the editors' transcriptions. Four appendixes contain an illustration for New Poems, Yeats' draft of the volume's table of contents, a poem written in collaboration between Yeats and Dorothy Wellesley, and three unpublished ballads.
Author
William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and dramatist, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years Yeats served as an Irish Senator for two terms. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival, and along with Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn founded the Abbey Theatre, serving as its chief during its early years. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for what the Nobel Committee described as "inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation." He was the first Irishman so honored. Yeats is generally considered one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize; such works include The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1929). Yeats was born and educated in Dublin but spent his childhood in County Sligo. He studied poetry in his youth, and from an early age was fascinated by both Irish legends and the occult. Those topics feature in the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the century. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and those slow paced and lyrical poems display debts to Edmund Spenser and Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as to the Pre-Raphaelite poets. From 1900, Yeats' poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life. —from Wikipedia
