Tower (First Editions) [Paperback]

W. B. Yeats (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1999 | ISBN-10: 0140437177 | ISBN-13: 978-0140437171

First published in 1928, this is considered by many to be Yeats' greatest collection. It contains many of his most famous poems, including "Sailing to Byzantium" and "Leda and the Swan". In the PENGUIN CLASSICS: POETRY FIRST EDITIONS series.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

William Butler Yeats is generally considered to be Ireland's greatest poet, living or dead, and one of the most 

important literary figures of the twentieth century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923.  --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

A last-minute shopper entering a London bookstore on Valentine's Day in 1928 with six shillings to spend on a gift for his or her beloved could hardly have made a better investment -- either poetically or financially -- than one of the 2,000 copies of a volume Macmillan & Co. had published that morning: The Tower by W. B. Yeats. Twenty-one poems in 104 pages; six pages of notes; olive green cloth with a design by T. Sturge Moore stamped in gold on front and spine, also reproduced on the dust jacket. No illustrations, no book club dividends: simply one of the seminal volumes of Modern Poetry, indeed of poetry in English as we know it. Doubtless not every lyric is a masterpiece, but how often have we been given between two covers such "monuments of magnificence" as "Sailing to Byzantium," "Leda and the Swan," and "Among School Children" -- not to mention "The Tower," "Meditations in Time of Civil War," "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen," or "Two Songs from a Play"? "A thing never known again," indeed.

The gestation of The Tower was a long process. A draft of "The New Faces" was sent to Lady Gregory on 7 December 1912; a draft of "From 'Oedipus at Colonus'" was sent to Olivia Shakespear on 13 March 1927. Yeats began to publish the poems that would form The Tower in journals as early as March 1921 and in book form the following year: Seven Poems and a Fragment, an edition of only 500 copies by the Cuala Press, the private press run by his sisters. Two more Cuala Press volumes would follow -- The Cat and the Moon and Certain Poems (1924), again in a printing of only 500 copies; and October Blast (1927), one of the rarest of all Cuala publications, only 350 copies. The single poem in The Tower not previously published would be "Colonus' Praise." Finally, on 16 September 1927, Yeats submitted copy for the volume to Macmillan:

I send you...the manuscript of 'The Tower.' Feeling that it was exaggerated in certain directions I continually put off sending it, but I cannot delay any longer. If, when you have received the Manuscript, you think the book too small, or have any fault to find, please delay it for a few months.

Yeats went on to explain that he was writing a series of poems for a limited American edition (The Winding Stair, 1929) and that these could be added to The Tower in a year. Seldom has a Nobel Laureate been quite so diffident about his latest work.

Although the Cuala Press Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921) had been included in Later Poems (1922), Macmillan had not published a major new volume of Yeats's poetry since The Wild Swans at Coole (1919). It is thus not surprising that the publisher gave little heed to Yeats's reservations about The Tower and instead put the book into production, with publication on 14 February 1928. The volume quickly sold out, and a second impression was issued in March. In July 1929 Macmillan published a third impression with some corrections. An edition by Macmillan, New York, appeared on 22 May 1928, with a second impression in January 1929.

As usual, Yeats treated The Tower as a unique work, not simply a collection of poems. The order of the poems was anything but chronological, either in terms of composition or of the events depicted. For instance, the second poem written and the first published, "All Souls' Night," was placed last. "Meditations in Time of Civil War," describing the violence in Ireland of 1922-23, precedes "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen." A poem that concludes with the story of Christ, "Two Songs from a Play," is followed by one that describes the union of Leda and Zeus.

Yeats's interest in The Tower as a separate work of art extended to the physical book itself. Once the arrangements for the volume had been made with Macmillan, he enlisted his friend T. Sturge Moore, a writer and artist, to undertake the design, writing him on 23 May 1927:

I want you to design the cover -- design in gold -- and a frontispiece. The book is to be called The Tower, as a number of the poems were written at and about Ballylee Castle. The frontispiece I want is a drawing of the castle, something of the nature of a woodcut. If you consent I will send you a bundle of photographs. It is a most impressive building and what I want is an imaginative impression. Do what you like with cloud and bird, day and night, but leave the great walls as they are.

Moore immediately agreed. Yeats sent him some poems and photographs and made the further suggestion that "the Tower should not be too unlike the real object, or rather that it should suggest the real object. I like to think of that building as a permanent symbol of my work plainly visible to the passer-by. As you know, all my art theories depend upon just this -- rooting of mythology in the earth" (LTSM 114). Yeats approved of Moore's design of the Tower reflected in the adjacent stream, telling him, "It is interesting that you should have completed Tower symbolism by surrounding it with water" (LTSM 111). Unfortunately, because of some lost or misdirected correspondence, Moore failed to produce a frontispiece. But when Yeats received a copy of the volume, he wrote Moore from Rapallo on 23 February 1928, "Your cover for The Tower is a most rich, grave and beautiful design, admirably like the place..." (LTSM 123).

Yeats's earliest recorded comment on the book as a whole was made in a letter to Lady Gregory on 24 March 1928: "The Tower astonishes me by its bitterness." On 25 April 1928 he told Olivia Shakespear, "Re-reading The Tower I was astonished at its bitterness, and long to live out of Ireland that I may find some new vintage. Yet that bitterness gave the book its power and it is the best book I have written."

Although there was the odd dissenting voice, by and large the reviewers were in accord with Yeats's judgment on his achievement. Writing to Yeats less than two weeks after publication, Lennox Robinson commented that "'The Tower' seems to be getting wonderful notices, the Observer has it as a 'best seller'....and the Independent this morning is extraordinarily intelligent." Yeats himself told Lady Gregory on 1 April 1928 that "Tower is receiving great favour. Perhaps the reviewers know that I am so ill that I can be commended without future inconvenience....Even the Catholic Press is enthusiastic" (L 740). Likewise, he wrote Olivia Shakespear on 25 April 1928, "The Tower is a great success, two thousand copies in the first month, much the largest sale I have ever had..." (L 742). In an unsigned review in The Times Literary Supplement for 1 March 1928, for example, Austin Clarke found in The Tower "a freedom of the poetic elements, an imaginative and prosodic beauty that brings one the pure and impersonal joy of art"; he also praised "the delightful cover design of this book." Writing in The Criterion for September 1928, John Gould Fletcher offered The Tower as evidence that Yeats "corresponds, or will correspond, when the true literary history of our epoch is written, to what we moderns mean by a great poet." In The New Republic for 10 October 1928 Theodore Spencer noted that "on the whole, the poems in this book are among the finest Mr. Yeats has written" and that "many...will remain a permanent part of English poetry." In sum, the consensus of both the reviewers and most later critics and readers of Yeats's poetry is well represented by Virginia Woolf's judgment in an unsigned review in The Nation & Athenaeum for 21 April 1928: "Mr. Yeats has never written more exactly and more passionately."

Most other poets would have been more than content with such acclaim, and the story of The Tower would have ended. But Yeats as usual was not content, and over the next five years he would make significant changes to the volume, so much so that readers who know The Tower only from its final version will find this facsimile edition more than a little surprising.

For the 1929 third impression Yeats made only minor changes, some as small -- but telling -- as the addition of a hyphen in "moon-luminous" ("Meditations in Time of Civil War," III.10), some more significant, such as that to lines 5-6 of "Sailing to Byzantium." The text in 1928 is virtually unpronounceable:

Fish flesh or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten born and dies.

One is tempted to think that both Yeats and the proofreader at Macmillan had nodded off, but in fact the exact same version had appeared a year earlier in October Blast, and on the proofs of that volume Yeats made a correction elsewhere in the first stanza of the poem but left these lines untouched. A second version appeared when the poem was used as the epigraph in Stories of Red Hanrahan and The Secret Rose (1927):

Fish, flesh or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten born and dies.

This is arguably worse, and one is again tempted to assume somnolence. However, on 10 September 1927 Yeats had written Macmillan, "I return the proof of the poem, which is now correct. Through vacillation over the punctuation of the first stanza I have made a blotted proof but I think it is clear." So it was not until the 1929 version of The Tower that we are offered what surely seems the inevitable version (even if grammarians would protest the comma after "fowl"):

Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Yeats's next opportunity to revise The Tower occurred in connection with the volume of Poems in the Edition de Luxe, a project that in the event would never see the light of day. Either when he submitted copy on 1 June 1931 or when he corrected two sets of proofs from June through September 1932, Yeats made only one change of note, but it is an important one: "From 'O... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 80 pages
• Publisher: Penguin UK (May 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140437177
• ISBN-13: 978-0140437171
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.2 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,626,226 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Review of "Sailing to Byzantium", January 30, 2011

By 

Tiger Holland (North Alabama) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Tower: A Facsimile Edition (Paperback)

Yeats is one of my Top 5 favorite poets, and while I don't really have a favorite collection of his (overall, I stick to his Selected Works to get a wide range of his writing), The Tower is special because it contains "Sailing to Byzantium," one of the loveliest and most well-known poems he wrote. It's 4 stanzas of ottava rima, rhyming ABABABCC (young, trees, song, seas, long, dies, neglect, intellect), and it sticks pretty close to iambic pentameter.

"Sailing" begins with that famous line, "That is no country for old men," and it becomes clear that the poem is from the POV of an old man. Yeats himself was in his 60's when he wrote the poem, so the concerns of old age weren't far removed from him. Stanza 1:

"That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect."

So he's complaining, basically. "That" country seems to be the one he's currently living in, or the one he is leaving or has just now left. It's a land of youth where all the attention is placed on young lovers and on the animals, birds, and fish that live exuberantly and then die without any sort of advancement. Old men aren't commended even if their wisdom is "unageing"--they don't fit into this country. Stanza 2 shows how he proposes to get past his biologically-obsessed environment:

"An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium."

If physical forms are what we're celebrating, then senior citizens aren't much to talk about. An old man is valuable for his wisdom and his soul, and he should learn to appreciate the battle scars of life or tatters in his "mortal dress". Still, to gain this sort of appreciation he'll have to study art, the "monuments of [the soul's] magnificence". And it's for that purpose that he has has arrived in Byzantium, an ancient city known for its art and culture. I personally think he's only in Byzantium in his imagination, not simply because Byzantium's not really around anymore, but because the last two stanzas seem even less like reality than the first two. Stanza 3:

"O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity."

He seems to be asking figures in a paining to come out of their artwork and teach him how to appreciate his condition and his soul. He's really done with his broken-down body and wants to be removed from it. His language is very rough at this point, comparing his body to a beast on the verge of death. He wants to belong to the world of eternal art.

"Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come."

In Stanza 3 it seemed like the speaker was in Byzantium, talking to the mosaics, but now it seems like it was all in his imagination, because he's still not where he'd like to be. More than just being dissatisfied with his own weak body, he has decided that if he ever has another form, he'll want to be something finely crafted and unnatural (most scholars say that this signing gold object is a mechanical bird). It's so unusual that this is the speaker's ideal self: a beautiful, permanent piece of interactive art who has access to information about the future. As a reader, what do you even do with that? It sure keeps English teachers busy, diving into the possible interpretations.

The speaker is totally wrapped up in reaching that other country of Byzantium, whether it's supposed to be a literal place where old men are revered, a symbolic place representing the artistic imagination, or a depiction of the afterlife. It can be all three or something else entirely, as the reader likes--the main point is that in whatever way we interpret the specifics, we are listening to a speaker who is longing to be reprieved from decay and old age. And aren't we all? This is a beautiful poem that's very pleasing to the ear and it bears up under endless classroom discussion--if I'd written this review on a different day, I probably would have made entirely different points. It's a favorite poem of mine because it's hinting at something important, but it's just unnerving enough to make you wonder if the speaker's philosophy isn't quite as perfect as he thinks.