Yeats's Mythologies

Just out: a new edition of W. B. Yeats's Mythologies, edited and fully annotated by Warwick Gould and Deirdre Toomey, revised Neil Mann. This is available for free download as a PDF, or as a paperback or hardback book (£29.95 and £43.95 respectively). 

W. B. Yeats's Mythologies

Open Book Publishers have just launched a new edition of W. B. Yeats's Mythologies, a volume that brings together Yeats's early folklore articles and short fiction. Projected during Yeats's lifetime as part of Macmillan's Edition de Luxe, this collection originally appeared in 1959.* Warwick Gould and Deirdre Toomey prepared the volume of Mythologies for the Collected Works of W. B. Yeats (Scribner), but differences with the series's general editor, Richard Finneran, led them to withdraw it from that series and publish it independently with Macmillan in 2005. 

It had a rather limited circulation, as it never had proper distribution outside Britain and Ireland, and received relatively little publicity. Gould and Toomey retrieved the rights from Palgrave Macmillan in 2022 and were planning a new edition of the work, talking with Clemson University Press and Open Book Publishers about a open access PDF version of the book. When they died in December last year—Warwick just three weeks after Deirdre—they were moving forward with Open Book Publishers, but had no concrete schedule. 

I was honoured to take on the task of seeing the new edition into print—and as I went through tidying and revising, it often felt like a dialogue with Gould and Toomey through the words on the page. It's taken rather longer than I originally expected, but for someone who tends to focus on the later years of Yeats's career, it has been a wonderful immersion in Yeats's earlier years: his study of folklore in The Celtic Twilight, Irish legend and history in The Secret Rose and Stories of Red Hanrahan, and the jewelled prose of the occult stories, 'Rosa Alchemica', 'The Tables of the Law', and 'The Adoration of the Magi'. Those who have come across this edition before will know the richness of the annotation provided by Gould and Toomey, and those who haven't will find an abundance of background and explication for these works, tracing how Yeats's reading and experience fed into his writing. And now readers won't have to keep their thumb in the back half of the book, as the note numbers in the text are linked to the notes at the back of the book (and vice versa).

Please do comment here or write to me (yeatsvision@gmail.com) with any reactions or problems you encounter—and, though I have spent hours combing the text for typos and mistakes, I know that there will be some of those, too! Again, please let me know.

* In the Edition de Luxe Mythologies was paired with The Irish Dramatic Movement, which collected articles from Samhain, The Arrow, and a few isolated pieces. The 1959 edition dropped The Irish Dramatic Movement (which appeared in Explorations in 1962), but included Per Amica Silentia Lunae, which is omitted here—it appeared in Later Essays, volume V of the Collected Works.