Much labouring: Constructions of W. B. Yeats's "In the Seven Woods" and "Green Helmet" volumes.

Abstract

Although scholars have devoted much attention to Yeats, they have neglected critically and textually the two important transitional volumes of his middle years, In the Seven Woods (1903) and The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910). But Yeats's remarkable transformation from talented 1890s aesthete to major modern poet first manifested itself in these volumes, which represent crucial milestones in his poetic development. They also provide an interesting test case for recent theories concerning the constitution of texts. Because both volumes have been repeatedly revised by Yeats and by others, this study centers upon their textual evolution. Following the lead of such recent textual theorists as Jerome McGann, it interprets this evolution both by reconstructing the various versions of the two volumes and by investigating the circumstances of these versions' composition, production, and reception. These circumstances include, in particular, Yeats's collaborative relationships with his publishers and audiences. In addition to enabling fuller readings of the two volumes, reconstructing the original versions of In the Seven Woods and the Green Helmet allows this study to recover Yeats's poetic development--unobscured by subsequent revisions--during the first years of this century. After 1899 Yeats slowly shifted from a poetics centered upon symbolism to a poetics centered upon dramatic conflict, and this transformation affected not only his style and choice of subject matter, but also his attempts to organize volumes of poetry as unified aesthetic works. In the Seven Woods and the Green Helmet represent Yeats's first experiments with the dramatic progression, ultimately the form of all of his mature volumes. In the process of tracing the textual history of these two volumes from their original publication to the present day, this study contributes to current theoretical debates concerning the nature of textuality and authority. It argues that texts consist of linguistic, contextual, and bibliographic codes, and that literary works--authored collaboratively with publishers and audiences--need to be constituted as the totality of their textual and interpretive versions.