The Tower: A Facsimile Edition
A poetry collection where old age, art, myth, and history all intersect. Yeats’s late thought crystallizes sharply between symbol and private memory.
Work Information
A highly symbolic collection that condenses Yeats’s late thought.
The Tower is read as a peak of Yeats’s 1920s work, where the personal sense of aging meets Irish myth and historical consciousness. Even in its severity, the poems retain a refusal to give up on life.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Scribner
- Published
- 2004-01-20
- Pages
- 161 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 13.02 x 1.27 x 19.05 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780743247283
- ISBN-10
- 0743247280
- Price
- 3105 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Poetry/British
The first edition of W. B. Yeats's The Tower appeared in bookstores in London on Valentine's Day, 1928. His English publisher printed just 2,000 copies of this slender volume of twenty-one poems, priced at six shillings. The book was immediately embraced by book buyers and critics alike, and it quickly became a bestseller. Subsequent versions of the volume made various changes throughout, but this Scribner facsimile edition reproduces exactly that seminal first edition as it reached its earliest audience in 1928, adding an introduction and notes by esteemed Yeats scholar Richard J. Finneran. Written between 1912 and 1927, these poems ("Sailing to Byzantium," "Leda and the Swan," and "Among School Children" among them) are today considered some of the best and most famous in the entire Yeats canon. As Virginia Woolf declared in her unsigned review of this collection, "Mr. Yeats has never written more exactly and more passionately."
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.
Reviews
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The Tower
Libro in ottime condizioni, solo piccola scalfittura sul frontespizio in alto al centro. Tempi di consegna un po' lunghi ma come previsto.
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Poor cover quality.
This is not what you would expect from deluxe editions. Paper quality is perfect, though. J just read the first poem, which is not bad. Hope to find even better poems.
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Buy the hard copy edition
One of the most glorious collections of poetry ever. Don't spoil the experience by attempting to read it on a screen. The paperback is handsomely done, and these superb poems deserve your full attention. Presentation matters with poetry, especially poetry of this quality.
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The Tower
This was the first book of poetry that Yeats published after winning the Nobel prize in 1923. The Prize often seems to be awarded to writers after they have creatively died, or to kill them off creatively. Yeats had the genius to survive his good fortune. Like Goethe he had the trick of remaining creative and relevant into old age. I bought the book because, although it is easy to come by a poet's "collecteds and selecteds", its often much harder to find books of their poems as they published them. I'm sure most of the time this is no great loss, but in this case the reissue is wholly justified, as Yeats reacts to his own ageing and to the transformation of Ireland going on around him. The binding and paper look as if they'll stand up to a few years of use, and it has a pretty cover.
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This is not a first edition - book collectors take note!
This is not a first edition - book collectors take note!