Original Journals Online II

If you are among those interested in the more esoteric aspects of Yeats probably already know about the International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals, IAPSOP, but if you don't, they have a wealth of material covering the period "between the Congress of Vienna and the start of the Second World War", so the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The Archive Index features over a thousand periodical titles, most of which run to multiple issues, and includes the major journals read by W. B. and George Yeats and their "fellow students" of esoterica (AVA xii, CW13 lv). These include the spiritualist journal Light, the Theosophical journals Lucifer and the Irish Theosophist, as well as others such as the Occult Review, Borderland, the Quest, and the Astrologer's Magazine. (There are still gaps in some of the journal runs.)

Yeats himself did not publish many articles in these more specialist journals. However, in his earlier years he did contribute to Lucifer and the Irish Theosophist, for example. 

Lucifer, 15 January 1889 (cf. Collected Works vol. IX, Early Articles and Reviews, 75ff).

 

The Irish Theosophist, October 1892 (cf. Collected Works vol. IX, Early Articles and Reviews, 182ff).

Most of Yeats's articles have, however, been collected and reprinted (perhaps surprisingly, not all*), and it is often the articles that were available and that he was—or could have been—reading that are of interest. These are usually unobtainable, except in the largest libraries and in many cases relatively localized, so the opportunity to find the magazines that are referred to in letters or notes and to peruse the articles being discussed is invaluable. 

Seeing the intellectual influences that the Yeatses were exposed to is often illuminating and is one of the reasons why their library and marginalia are so fascinating. Yet we know that the Yeatses read these journals, and browsing almost any issue from this period can provide possible insights into the less conventional ideas they read about and provides context for their own thinking.

Borderland, July 1893

The Occult Review, November 1929

The IAPSOP site enables Search via a restricted Google search, which can be very fruitful, though recent additions may not yet be included and the vagaries of Optical Character Recognition can mean that it will not pick up all instances of the search term—a degree of lateral thinking can be useful!

The site also includes the Standard Spiritualist and Occult Corpus (SSOC) which aims "to provide, at low cost, a more or less complete document database of important primary book-length materials to all academic and non-academic researchers, aficionados, and readers interested in Spiritualism, the occult and allied parasciences" between 1790 and 1940, though with texts on either side of that declared span. It brings together material from a wide range of sources from John Dee and Le comte de Gabalis to Mathers, Lombroso, and The Scripts of Cleophas. 

 * One of these uncollected pieces is "A Dream of the World's End".

Original Journals Online I

One of the great resources for researchers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is the ever-increasing availability of journals and periodicals. For a long time, these were only really available in university and large research libraries, and in the cases of many of the more obscure and evanescent journals, only a few libraries held these. This situation was eased a little by reprints, but not again some of the more obscure articles were not included.

The invaluable companion for using these resources is a good bibliography, such as Allen Wade's bibliography for Yeats's own writings, or K. P. S. Jochum's bibliography for Yeats's and for others' writings about Yeats, such as reviews and interviews. The Variorum Edition of the Poems also gives the first publication place, which was often a journal.

 

I will start with a general portal, The Modernist Journals Project—modjourn.org— which provides "high-quality digital scans and metadata of periodicals published from 1890 to 1922". There are too many titles to list, but it's definitely a useful starting point for those who are looking for poems, articles, or essays that are part of Yeats's mainstream writing in their original state and context (I'll look at the resources for his more fringe interests later).

As a simple example here, I give Yeats's poem "He mourns for the Change that has come upon him and his Beloved, and longs for the End of the World" (Variorum Poems 153). The apparatus tells us that it was first published in The Dome in June 1897, before appearing in book form in The Wind Among the Reeds (catalogued as 11 at the front of the book). (As it also indicates, the titles were different in each case: "The Desire of Man and of Woman" in The Dome and "Mongan laments the Change that has come upon him and his Beloved"in The Wind Among the Reeds).

Going to the Modernist Journals Project and going through the alphabetical listing:

 

 

All the issues of The Dome are listed—in this case only five ever appeared!

Selecting Number 3, and opening it, the contents locate the Yeats poem:  

The whole issue can be downloaded in PDF from this page (see "Download Issue Data" on the left)—about 30 MB in this case.

Though it started in 2011, the project is very much ongoing and the site is still under continuing construction—there are places with "Lorem ipsum" dummy text and blank images. It offers useful tools that are well worth exploring, but it also rewards browsing and brings up plenty of unexpected insights into the period.