A Bibliography of Yeats Criticism 1887–1965

356 Pages·1971·32.229 MB·English

by  K. G. W. Cross, R. T. Dunlop (auth.)

A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF YEATS CRITICISM
1887-1965
A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF YEATS
CRITICISM 1887-1965
by
K. G. W. CROSS and R. T. DUNLOP
With a foreword by
A. NORMAN JEFFARES
Macmillan Education
© R. T. Dunlop and the Estate of K. G. W. Cross 1971
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1971
All rights reserved. No part of this publication
may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form
or by any means, without permission.
First published 1971 by
THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
London and Basingstoke
Associated companies in New York Toronto
Dublin Melbourne Johannesburg and Madras
SBN 333 05008 8
ISBN 978-1-349-00343-3 ISBN 978-1-349-00341-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-00341-9
Contents
Foreword, by A. Norman Jeffares vii
Introduction x1
William Butler Yeats, 1865-1939: A Chronology of the Works xix
Part I Bibliographies, Concordances and Descriptions of
Yeatsiana I
II Reviews ofWritings by W. B. Yeats 13
III Books and Pamphlets Wholly or Partly about
W. B. Yeats 59
IV Commemorative and Special Issues of Periodicals 159
V Articles Wholly or Partly about W. B. Yeats 165
VI Dissertations and Theses 277
List of Newspapers and Periodicals Cited 293
Index 304
v
Foreword
This most useful account of the vast amount of wntmg on
W. B. Yeats has been compiled over many years by the late Professor
K. G. W. Cross of the University of Newcastle, New South Wales, and
by his friend and sometime colleague at the University of Sydney, Mr
R. T. Dunlop. In writing this foreword to introduce their work it
seemed to me that I should say something of Professor Cross, whose
early death cut short a most promising academic career and deprived
his many friends of the friendship of an unusually lively and gifted man.
Kenneth Gustav Walter Cross grew up in Norfolk, and was edu
cated at Diss Grammar School. After three years in the Royal Army
Educational Corps he read English and French at Trinity College,
Dublin. This was at a period when the English School was run by
Professor H. 0. White, benign and only apparently absent-minded;
his colleagues were Dr Fitzroy Pyle and Mr R. B. D. French. All three
blended - as did Dr Sheehy Skeffington of the School of French - the
imparting of knowledge with a sociable informality. It was a civilised
atmosphere to which Gus Cross responded with delight. After winning
his First Class Moderatorship he became Lefroy Stein Research Fellow
in Trinity College and began work on John Marston under Fitzroy
Pyle's supervision. This resulted in a thesis crammed with exhaustive
work: indeed it could have been sent to the printer on its completion.
But this was one of the many things Gus Cross might have done one
day - he was fastidious in assessing his own work, and so we can read
only a dozen articles (and two dozen notes on Marston's vocabulary)
on such diverse matters as dating the plays and a general assessment of
Marston.
Out of his deep interest in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century drama
came Cross's knowledge of bibliography and the minutiae of scholar
ship. He thought the state of most of the texts of seventeenth-century
drama left much to be desired. One of the last evenings I spent with
him, in Leeds in 1963, was devoted to drawing up a scheme for old
spelling texts. This resulted in the Fountainwell Drama Texts, a series
which Robin Lorimer the publisher and I had had in mind for some
years, to the planning of which Cross brought his own special brand of
missionary zeal. Cross himself was engaged in editing two Shakespeare
texts for this series in his last two years - the standard of his editorial
work can be seen in his edition of Titus Andronicus (a Pelican Shakespeare,
1965). He had much imagination in suggesting texts and editors for
Vll
A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF YEATS CRITICISM
them, and, as befitted an honorary Dubliner, his conversational com
ments were flippant, witty and gay, a foil to the common sense ofhis
serious arguments.
Cross, however, was a man of inclusive tastes in his scholarship. His
education at Trinity had encouraged this, and he had a passionate interest
in the Anglo-Irish literary revival - in Synge and Yeats especially -
while he could recite long passages from all of Joyce's writings with
gusto and delight. His reading in French literature ran far beyond
anything expected of a first-class graduate and his collection of French
books was large. But his whole appetite for literature was enormous.
Twentieth-century American literature he knew very well indeed, and
his 'Writers and Critics' study of F. Scott Fitzgerald reveals his
appreciative attitude to writers whose work he admired. When he left
Dublin he taught for a time at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, where
he disliked the current attitudes to black Africans. Once he moved to
Australia (he held university posts, first in Adelaide, then in Sydney and
fmally in Newcastle) he indulged his hydropic thirst for knowledge by
plunging into the reading of Australian literature. To this he brought a
critical view particularly sympathetic: used to making comparisons, he
believed in the importance - and the immediacy - of writing in
rapidly developing countries. He came to Leeds to teach Australian
Literature as our Visiting Fellow in Commonwealth Literature in 1963,
and during his time in Yorkshire we began to edit a volume ofe ssays to
commemorate the centenary ofYeats's birth, In Excited Reverie. As he
toured the United States in the autumn of 1963 Gus hurled letter after
letter at me, filled with pleasure and excitement as the book took shape
and as he met many of the scholars whose work he admired. Although
by now he knew his days were numbered, his temperament did not
allow him any self-commiseration or any world-weary air. In the
Jacobeans and perhaps in Joyce he found pessimism enough to satisfy
him; but he weighed up his own life in such a way that delight over
came despair. This balancing often led him to an endearing self
mockery - he had acquired in Dublin an Irish capacity to tell a story
against himsel£ Yet he was drawn to the positive and the creative: in
American, in Australian, and especially in Anglo-Irish writers. His
interest in Yeats was deep, and in his 1963 visit to Europe and America
he added new items to his already profound knowledge of what had
been written on Yeats, and indeed on the work of his critics.
This amalgam of scholar in seventeenth-century drama and savant in
modem writing and criticism was a man whose eyes could dance with
Vlll
FOREWORD
excited enthusiasm or amusement: his laugh was bound to emerge at
some stage in any conversation. He was indeed an excellent conver
sationalist with a sense of dramatic intensity as well as a relish for the
absurd. He was kind, generous - even careless - with his money when
he had any, and he never had, nor ever would have had enough, be
cause he used it fully as a means to other ends: hospitality mainly, the
buying of books incessantly. All his life was lived as though in some sub
conscious extra awareness of its brevity. And so he crammed it full with
work and enjoyment. Yet, paradoxically, he seemed to be hom un
lucky. Things happened to him in an endless succession of misfortunes,
small and large. He always shook these troubles off, after brief moments
of intense private melancholia and perhaps after a quick worried har
angue of one of his many friends, something bound to end in his firm
changing of the subject with an invitation to a drink, a meal, or the
contemplation of some ironic absurdity oflife or literature or both.
Always he was a kind and lovable person, for he had an instinctive
friendliness and was baffled by the malice or mischief-making propensi
ties of others, even at times by their dullness. His sense of pleasure in
varied experience was conveyed to others with gay generosity, an
unselfconscious disregard for the conventions, and an enthusiasm which
overflowed into so many different directions : he liked art, and so he
painted well; he liked speed and so he drove cars, both large and small,
with dash and a certain amount of abandon; he liked parties and talk
and so he liked people; and this is the quality which gave his
Renaissance-like multiplicity of character its integrity of purpose.
He was in the right place as a professor: he was a scholar rather than an
administrator; he conveyed encouragement as well as giving help to
others; and he was a teacher, not an indoctrinator. This is perhaps why
he sought to provide-as in this bibliography-the materials upon which
others would form their own opinions and judgements. His ambition
from his undergraduate days had been to be a professor whose work
would be known and lasting. He worked extremely hard. Yet there was
not time enough, not nearly enough, in his thirty-'nine years to match his
intellectual appetency and the scholarly achievement he desired. It will
be some small solace to his friends and family that Mr Dunlop has
completed the work on this bibliography which in its account of
Y eatsian scholarship and criticism should prove an invaluable work of
reference.
Ledenon, France, 1970 A. NoRMAN JEFFARES
IX
Introduction
Katharine Tynan published her review of Mosada in 1887, taking up
publicly and with relish the task that Gerard Manley Hopkins evaded
privately when John Butler Yeats showed him his son's poems.
Between Miss Tynan's approving observations and the encouraging
comments ofc ritics like Fr Matthew Russell, editor of the Irish Monthly,
on the one hand, and on the other the close of 1965, the year in which
the centenary ofYe ats's birth was celebrated 'from China to Peru' as a
Times Literary Supplement reviewer put it in 1966, a daunting amount
has been written about Yeats, visible measure of the growth of his
reputation as a poet (laudatory to the extent that the occasional dissi
dence ofF. Hugh O'Donnell, the Daily Nation, the Catholic Bulletin, or
more recently of Yvor Winters is a refreshing reminder that dis
agreement about the greatness of even a great poet is still possible).
Writings on Yeats now exceed those on any of his contemporaries
writing in English or, one suspects, in any other language. Much of the
material, however, especially that written before 1900, appeared in
newspapers and journals that are now forgotten by most Yeats readers,
and is preserved only in the files of the older libraries of the English
speaking world. If, to the geographical scatter of this material, is added
the increasing frequency with which Yeats finds his way into books
that one would not automatically take up in the search for information
about him, then the point of George Brandon Saul's reference to the
'labyrinth' ofYeats criticism becomes very clear.
The need to record the steadily increasing flow of periodical litera
ture in general was recognised before the end of the century, and Yeats
studies have found their place in listings of it since his work first began
to appear. Publications like Poole's Index to Periodical Literature and
The Nineteenth Century Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature provided
a valuable account of early criticism. The successors to these, together
with the British Library Association's Subject Index to Periodicals,
continued the service to scholars. The Annual Bibliography of English
Literature and the annual bibliographical supplements in the Publica
tions of the Modern Language Association of America, now the two most
comprehensive listings of writings on literature in English, have greatly
increased the available resources. The Year's Work in English Studies has
regularly included Yeats criticism in its annual commentary, and one or
two specialist journals now issue annual lists in which Yeats material
may be found. In all, then, the various bibliographical collections have
xi
A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF YEATS CRITICISM
provided a generous coverage of the growing literature on Yeats. It may
well be that the expansion of computer services to the field will write
finis to the conventional check-list. However that may be, the accessi
bility of current criticism has increased enormously over the past
twenty-five years, and there seems to be no reason why, whatever the
means, it should not continue to do so.
Bibliographies devoted exclusively to Yeats are of two kinds:
descriptive bibliographies of his own writings and bibliographies of
writings about him and his work. Both began to make their appearances
early in the present century. The late Allan Wade devoted a lifetime to
the task of arranging and describing Yeats's published work (adding to
it the equally exacting one of collecting the Yeats Letters). As early as
1908 he published his first Bibliography, reprinted as part of Vol. VIII
of the Collected Edition of the Works in the same year. A. J. A. Symons
issued his Bibliography in 1924; and in 1951 Wade's definitive Biblio
graphy of the Writings of W. B. Yeats appeared. At the time of his death
he was working on the second edition, which was completed by his
publisher, Rupert Hart-Davis, and issued in 1958. Ten years later the
third edition was published, revised and edited by Russell K. Alspach,
who fully maintained the standard of scholarship set in the earlier
editions, and who had already contributed his 'Additions to Allan
Wade's Bibliography of W. B. Yeats' to the Irish Book in 1963. More,
of course, remains to be done. John P. Frayne's edition of the Un
collected Prose, to be published by Macmillan & Co. Ltd (Vol. I has
will
appeared already), no doubt provide material for additions to the
Wade Bibliography. But the foundations are secure.
Even before the descriptive bibliographies, lists of Yeats criticism
began to appear. F. Sidgwick appended a short one to his study ofYeats
in the English Illustrated Magazine in 1903. A carefully compiled reading
list, prepared by Alice Thurston McGirr, was printed in the Boston
Bulletin of Bibliography in 1913. Between such early lists and the 1940s,
the task of recording Yeats material - primary and secondary - was
shared by the Indexes and Bibliographies already referred to. After
Yeats's death in 1939, writings about him began to increase rapidly,
an increase heralded by the memorial volume, Scattering Branches,
edited by Stephen Gwynn (1940) and Joseph M. Hone's biography,
W. B. Yeats 1865-1939 (1943). The number and quality of the reviews
accorded to the second of these books was a pointer to the way in
which the scholarly interest in Yeats was to develop. Also in 1940,
The Cambridge Bibliography included a classified list ofbooks and articles
xu