Yeats Poems

[Yeats, W.B.] Mays, J.C.C. / Parrish, Stephen. New Poems - Manuscript Materials by W.B.Yeats. Edited by J.C.C.Mays and Stephen Parrish. Ithaca / London, Cornell University Press, 2000. ISBN: 0300046278
The last volume that Yeats published in his lifetime, "New Poems" contains 35 poems, including "Lapis Lazuli" and "The Municipal Gallery Re-visited". In language fuelled by rage and frustration, the poems traverse emotions stimulated by his feelings towards women, travels to Majorca and political ideas. The materials gathered 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 - by not trapped by - the margins of loose-leaf pages, in Yeats' own characteristically illegible hand, are accompanied by the editors' transcriptions. Four appendixes contain an illustrations for "New Poems", Yeats' draft of the volume's table of contents, a poem written in collaboration with Dorothy Wellesley and three unpublished ballads. (amazon)

4°. XXXIX, 399 pages. First Edition. Original Hardcover with original dustjacket. Near Fine condition.

[SW: Irish Literature, W.B.Yeats, William Butler Yeats]

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Clarke, Austin. Old-Fashioned Pilgrimage & other poems. Dublin, The Dolmen Press, 1967. ISBN: 0851051081
Austin Clarke (May 9, 1896-March 19, 1974) was one of the leading Irish poets of the generation after W. B. Yeats. He also wrote plays, novels and memoirs. Clarke's main contribution to Irish poetry was the rigour with which he used technical means borrowed from classical Irish language poetry when writing in English. Effectively, this meant writing English verse based not so much on metre as on complex patterns of assonance, consonance, and half rhyme. Describing his technique to Robert Frost, Clarke said "I load myself down with chains and try to wriggle free." Clarke's early poetry clearly shows the influence of Yeats. His first book, The Vengeance of Fionn was a long narrative poem retelling an Ossianic legend. It met with critical acclaim and, unusually for a first book of poetry, went to a second edition. Between this and the 1938 collection Night and Morning, Clarke published a number of collections, all of which, to one extent or another, can be seen as being written in the shadow of Yeats. There was, however, one significant difference; unlike the older poet, Clarke was a Catholic, and themes of guilt and repentance run through this early work. Between 1938 and 1955, Clarke published no new lyric or narrative poetry. He was co-founder of the Lyric Theatre Company and wrote a number of verse plays for them. He also worked as a journalist and had a weekly poetry programme on RTE radio. It seems likely that he also experienced some kind of personal crisis during this time and this had significant consequences for his later poetry. Clarke returned to the publishing with the 1955 collection Ancient Lights, and was to continuing writing and publishing prolifically for the rest of his life. Although he continued to use the same Gaelic-derived technical means, this late poetry is markedly different from the earlier work. Many of the poems he then wrote were satires of the Irish church and state, while others were sensual celebrations of human sexuality, free of the guilt of the earlier poems. He also published the intensely personal Mnemosyne Lay in Dust, which is a poem sequence detailing the fictional Maurice Devanes's nervous breakdown and subsequent recovery. Clarke also came to admire the work of more avant-garde poets as Ezra Pound and Pablo Neruda, both of whom he wrote poems about. A number of the late long poems, such as, for instance, the 1971 Tiresias, show the effects of reading these poets in their looser formal structures. Clarke set up the Bridge Press to publish his own work, which allowed him the freedom to publish work that many mainstream Irish publishers of the time might have been reluctant to handle. His Collected Poems was published in 1974 and a Selected Poems in 1976. In addition to some twenty volumes of poetry and numerous plays, Clarke published three novels: The Bright Temptation (1932), The Singing Men at Cashel (1936), and The Sun Dances at Easter (1952). All of these were banned by the Irish Censorship Board. He also published two volumes of memoirs, Twice Round the Black Church (1962) and A Penny in the Clouds (1968) and a number of scattered critical essays and book reviews. While all of these prose writings are of interest, Clarke's reputation rests firmly on his poetry. In 1920 Clarke married Cornelia (Lia) Cummins. The marriage effectively lasted only a few days, and Clarke spent several months in St. Patrick's Hospital recovering from it, but they did not divorce before Cummins died in 1943. Clarke met, had three sons with, and later married (1945) Norah Esmerelda Patricia Walker (1900-1985), granddaughter of Matt Harris, MP for East Galway from 1885 to 1890. Austin Clarke lived beside the bridge in the south Dublin suburb of Templeogue. The new Templeogue bridge was renamed The Austin Clarke Bridge (Wikipedia)

8°. 55 pages. 1967-Edition. Original Hardcover with original dustjacket in protective Mylar. Only the dustjacket slightly sunned. Otherwise very good+ / near fine condition condition of his rare publication. [Irish Life and Culture - II].

[SW: Irish Literature]

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Clarke, Austin. Poetry in Modern Ireland. With illustrations by Louis Le Brocquy. Dublin, Published for the Cultural Relations Committee of Ireland by Colm O Lochlainn, at The Sign of The Three Candles, 1951. ISBN: B0000CHZZE
Austin Clarke (May 9, 1896-March 19, 1974) was one of the leading Irish poets of the generation after W. B. Yeats. He also wrote plays, novels and memoirs. Clarke's main contribution to Irish poetry was the rigour with which he used technical means borrowed from classical Irish language poetry when writing in English. Effectively, this meant writing English verse based not so much on metre as on complex patterns of assonance, consonance, and half rhyme. Describing his technique to Robert Frost, Clarke said "I load myself down with chains and try to wriggle free." Clarke's early poetry clearly shows the influence of Yeats. His first book, The Vengeance of Fionn was a long narrative poem retelling an Ossianic legend. It met with critical acclaim and, unusually for a first book of poetry, went to a second edition. Between this and the 1938 collection Night and Morning, Clarke published a number of collections, all of which, to one extent or another, can be seen as being written in the shadow of Yeats. There was, however, one significant difference; unlike the older poet, Clarke was a Catholic, and themes of guilt and repentance run through this early work. Between 1938 and 1955, Clarke published no new lyric or narrative poetry. He was co-founder of the Lyric Theatre Company and wrote a number of verse plays for them. He also worked as a journalist and had a weekly poetry programme on RTE radio. It seems likely that he also experienced some kind of personal crisis during this time and this had significant consequences for his later poetry. Clarke returned to the publishing with the 1955 collection Ancient Lights, and was to continuing writing and publishing prolifically for the rest of his life. Although he continued to use the same Gaelic-derived technical means, this late poetry is markedly different from the earlier work. Many of the poems he then wrote were satires of the Irish church and state, while others were sensual celebrations of human sexuality, free of the guilt of the earlier poems. He also published the intensely personal Mnemosyne Lay in Dust, which is a poem sequence detailing the fictional Maurice Devanes's nervous breakdown and subsequent recovery. Clarke also came to admire the work of more avant-garde poets as Ezra Pound and Pablo Neruda, both of whom he wrote poems about. A number of the late long poems, such as, for instance, the 1971 Tiresias, show the effects of reading these poets in their looser formal structures. Clarke set up the Bridge Press to publish his own work, which allowed him the freedom to publish work that many mainstream Irish publishers of the time might have been reluctant to handle. His Collected Poems was published in 1974 and a Selected Poems in 1976. In addition to some twenty volumes of poetry and numerous plays, Clarke published three novels: The Bright Temptation (1932), The Singing Men at Cashel (1936), and The Sun Dances at Easter (1952). All of these were banned by the Irish Censorship Board. He also published two volumes of memoirs, Twice Round the Black Church (1962) and A Penny in the Clouds (1968) and a number of scattered critical essays and book reviews. While all of these prose writings are of interest, Clarke's reputation rests firmly on his poetry. In 1920 Clarke married Cornelia (Lia) Cummins. The marriage effectively lasted only a few days, and Clarke spent several months in St. Patrick's Hospital recovering from it, but they did not divorce before Cummins died in 1943. Clarke met, had three sons with, and later married (1945) Norah Esmerelda Patricia Walker (1900-1985), granddaughter of Matt Harris, MP for East Galway from 1885 to 1890. Austin Clarke lived beside the bridge in the south Dublin suburb of Templeogue. The new Templeogue bridge was renamed The Austin Clarke Bridge (Wikipedia)

Small -8°. 71 pages. Illustrated, original brochure. Some stronger foxing. Small tears on the hinges. [Irish Life and Culture - II].

[SW: Irish Literature]

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DANIELPOUR, Richard b. 1956. Songs of Solitude (Yeats Songs) for Baritone Soloist and Orchestra. Autograph musical manuscript. 2001.
"Richard Danielpour has become one of the most sought-after composers of his generation - a composer whose distinctive American voice is part of a rich neo-Romantic heritage with influences from pivotal composers like Britten, Copland, Bernstein, and Barber. His works are solidly rooted in the soil of tradition, yet [sing] with an optimistic voice for today [they] speak to the heart as well as the mind." www.schirmer.com
"On a Monday morning about three years ago, Richard Danielpour arrived in the small Hudson River Valley town of Cortlandt Manor, New York, to begin an unusual kind of composer residency. He was to live by himself for several weeks in Copland House, the former home of Aaron Copland, and get some serious composing work done. Unlike other resident fellowships - at Tanglewood, say, or Yaddo, or the MacDowell Colony - this one offered no companionship with fellow artists, only hours of solitude and communion with the spirit of the late American master, whose favorite river views and simple furnishings had been lovingly preserved in the house. "Copland's house was like his music," Mr. Danielpour recalls. "Everything was plain, nothing was there but what was needed. He once said that the art of orchestration was taking things away." The date, that Monday, was September 10, 2001. "
"Mr. Danielpour had brought two projects with him to Copland House. The first was examining and correcting the galley proofs of An American Requiem, the large-scale work for chorus, soloists, and orchestra that had occupied him since the previous September. Then, as time permitted, he would tackle a new commission from the Philadelphia Orchestra for the baritone Thomas Hampson. He bad brought along two possible texts for the new work, each consisting of a selection of poems: one by the 14th-century Persian poet Rumi, and another by the 20th-century Irish writer William Butler Yeats. "
"An American Requiem, as the composer describes it, is "an examination of why we traverse borders in order to kill other people." In the course of interviewing U.S. veterans who had served in wars from World War II to Operation Desert Storm, he said, "I found that my respect for these men went through the roof, but I became all the more adamant about war as a form of insanity." All that may have seemed a faraway prospect on the morning of September 11, as the sun poured into the large windows of the Copland studio, and Mr. Danielpour spread his proofs our on the late composer's work desk. Shortly after 9:00 a.m., he phoned his publisher, G. Schirmer, whose offices are located in downtown Manhattan, and he learned of the airplane attacks on the World Trade Center. After talking to various Schirmer staff members for half an hour, and hearing the grief and fear in their voices, he found the house's television set and turned it on, in time to watch the twin towers fall. "
"Many of us who work in the arts remember the days and weeks after September 11 as a time of shock and temporary paralysis, when there seemed to be no words or images or notes that could express the new and terrible world we were living in. Mr. Danielpour's situation, as he looked at his completed American Requiem, was different. "In a way," he says of that dreadful morning, "I was already in it before it happened. We had never experienced this on our own soil. But I had been trying to ask 'Why war?' for a whole year. And I was alone there. Had I been with other people, I might not have been able to work." In 10 days, he finished editing the proofs of the Requiem. "
"The new work for Philadelphia and Mr. Hampson was next, and now the Yeats poems asserted their claim. Although the Irish poet often wrote about the bloody communal passions of his era, there is, Mr. Danielpour says, "a quality of aloneness in these poems. And this is the most isolated I've been when writing a piece." His first reading of Yeats's apocalyptic poem "The Second Coming" during his student days remained a vivid memory, and now he finally felt ready to attempt a musical setting of it. Furthermore, he says, "I had mentioned to 'Tom Hampson a couple of years before, that I would probably do Yeats for him." Far from paralyzed by events, Mr. Danielpour sketched all six movements of Songs of Solitude at Copland House by October 5. He completed the work during a MacDowell residency the following December and January - in record time, by his standards. "
"During the work's composition, Mr. Danielpour says, "I became aware that I was locking onto those stages of grief that [the psychiatrist Elisabeth] Kubler-Ross wrote about in On Death and Dying - anger, denial, resignation, and the rest. There isn't a literal correspondence, bar by bar, but the music deals with them all in some way." For example, the work's third movement, "Drinking Song" (a setting of Yeats's poem "Blood and the Moon") sounds, the composer says, "as if it were sung by someone who's had a few too many. Over that jazzy walking bass, you hear the rage inside the bitter joke." "
"According to Mr. Danielpour, Thomas Hampson's particular gifts have left their mark on this score. "I've always wanted to write something for him to sing completely a capella, without accompaniment, because he's so good at that. I almost did that in the fourth sung, 'These Are the Clouds,' where there's only that D-flat on the chime, sounding a knell, the way they do in Italy when somebody dies. And he has this remarkable voix mixe - very soft high notes, not quite falsetto, which I used in 'The Second Coming.'" The composer also credits Mr. Hampson, to whom this work is dedicated, for many helpful suggestions about the use of breathing for expression in a sung text."
"Richard Danielpour, who by his own description made his reputation with "layered and rich" orchestral scores, cites his encounter with Yeats's spare verse, Copland's economical style, and Mr. Hampson's artistry, as giving him a different, and he hopes deeper, perspective on composition. "An American Requiem and Songs of Solitude," he says, "were the last two works before I started my opera" - that is, Margaret Garner, composed to a libretto by Toni Morrison, and scheduled for premieres in 2005 and 2006 by the commissioning opera companies in Michigan, Cincinnati, and Philadelphia. "Those pieces taught me that it's not what you put in the score, it's what you leave out." And so Songs of Solitude, a document of loss from a time of loss, may prove to be an artistic gain for both composer and listener. " David Wright ________________________________________

42 pp. Notated in pencil in two 64-page, 18-stave orchestral sketchbooks measuring 12" x 16-1/2", with markings in red and blue crayon.

[SW: Autograph 21st Century American]

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