"For students of Yeats the whole series is bound to become an essential reference source and a stimulus to important critical re-readings of Yeats's major works. In a wider context, the series will also provide an extraordinary and perhaps unique insight into the creative process of a great artists."—Irish Literary Supplement
"I consider the Cornell Yeats one of the most important scholarly projects of our time."—A. Walton Litz, Princeton University, coeditor of The Collected Poems of William Carols Williams and Personae: The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound
"The most ambitious of the many important projects in current studies of Yeats and perhaps of modern poetry generally.... The list of both general and series editors, as well as prospective preparers of individual volumes, reads like a Who's Who of Yeats textual studies in North America. Further, the project carries the blessing of Yeats's heirs and bespeaks an ongoing commitment from a major university press.... The series will inevitably engender critical studies based on a more solid footing than those of any other modern poet.... Its volumes will be consulted long after gyres of currently fashionable theory have run on."—Yeats Annual (1983)
Yeats is a poet as much of fact as of feeling. Every work of his has a source—whether from folklore, legend, mythology, the occult, or history: each a source that for him had a definite objective reality. The demands of this world and of that other world of Yeatsian spiritual reality often conflict. His play The Only Jealousy of Emer, particularly in its early drafts, offers a vivid portrayal of such a struggle. It marks one of the turning points of Yeats's career, because in its final form it is a synthesis of two profound experiences that were to shape his later work: his marriage to Georgie Hyde-Lees in 1917 brought him a certain degree of contentment with the joys of this world, while her automatic script provided a philosophical framework for his poems and plays.
Fighting the Waves—a prose version of The Only Jealousy of Emer staged at the Abbey Theatre in 1929 and revived in London in 1930, but never performed again—is an integral part of the history of Yeats's composition and revision of The Only Jealousy of Emer, and its manuscript drafts are therefore shown in this volume as part of the direct sequence of the composition of The Only Jealousy of Emer, even though Yeats himself ultimately considered Fighting the Waves a lesser work.
