The Wild Swans at Coole

Book excerpt: A stunning facsimile of the 1919 first edition of William Butler Yeats’s The Wild Swans at Coole: an elegant volume showcasing these poems as they would have first been read and a complement to facsimile editions The Winding Stair and The Tower. Published in 1919 during W.B. Yeats’s “middle stage” and composed of poems written during World War I, The Wild Swans at Coole is contemplative and elegiac. This collection captures Yeats at a time when he was looking back on his life, coming to terms with the realities of modern war, reflecting on lost love, and defining his place in the world as a poet. It features forty poems, among them “The Fisherman,” “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory,” “The Wild Swans at Coole,” and “On Being Asked for a War Poem.” This facsimile of the original 1919 edition presents the reader with the work in its original form, with handsome old fashioned type, how readers and Yeats himself would have seen it in the early twentieth century. A great gift book and collector’s item, The Wild Swans at Coole also includes an Introduction and notes by esteemed Yeats scholar George Bornstein.