Books

First edition, one of 2500 copies (Wade 158). Includes scarce jacket. 1/2 inch chips from jacket spine head and foot, and corner of rear panel, with minimal loss along other edges. Binding tight, pages clean and bright, boards in excellent condition with all gilt decorations still present. 1928 Hard Cover. vi, 110, 2 pp. Green cloth with elaborate gilt decorations by Thomas Sturge Moore, mirrored in the jacket design. ".the greatest poetry of Yeats in his difficult later manner. Yeats, however complicated his thought, remained a consummate musician in his expression of it." (Connolly, The Modern Movement 56a) Includes: Sailing to Byzantium; The Tower; Meditations in Time of Civil War; Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen; The Wheel; Youth and Age; The New Faces; A Prayer for My Son; Twon Songs from a Play; Wisdom; Leda and the Swan; On a Picture of a Black Centaur by Edmond Dulac; Among School Children; Colonus' Praise; The Hero, the Girl, and the Fool; Owen Ahern and His Dancers (The Lover Speaks, The Heart Replies); A Man Young and Old; The Three Monuments; From 'Oedipus at Colonus'; The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid; All Souls' Night; Notes. Comprises ".the summit of Yeats's creative achievement in these years is represented in The Tower (1928). This volume, decorated with one of Thomas Sturge Moore's most beautiful cover engravings, depicting Ballylee and its reflection, brought together the poems quarried out of new sources, expressed in new language. At the same time, as Richard Ellmann remarked of the breathtaking opening poem 'Sailing to Byzantium', Yeats had in a sense been writing them all his life. Thus that poem is a distillation of his well-established themes of human old age, the mutability of nature, and the eternity of art - but viewed quizzically through the prism of a millennial Byzantium created from his supercharged imagination and wide if erratic reading. As such, it has magnetized a phalanx of scholars but retains the quintessential Yeatsian combination of mystery and accessibility. The Tower also contains his two great sequences about history and violence, inspired by the Bolshevik as well as the Irish revolution - 'Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen' and 'Meditations in Time of Civil War'. The first interrogates 'the present state of the world' (its original title) through a complex commentary on cyclical history and personal disillusionment. 'Meditations' meanwhile, suggests, doubtfully enough, that the apocalyptic horses of destruction can herald a new creativity and growth, arising out of the wreckage of a superficially assured civilization. A volume that also includes 'Among School Children' and 'All Souls Night' has to be reckoned at the height of his achievement. While the personal voice is as dominant as ever, Yeats also demonstrates a new ability to raise abstruse philosophical questions in a language at once mobile, exploratory, and economical. He thought it the best book he had written, and he was right. The Tower also contains 'Leda and the Swan', written five years before, and already notorious. That recurring theme of the birth of civilizations through acts of violence was cast into shadow by the immediacy of the erotically charged imagery when Yeats published it in To-morrow, a short-lived magazine edited by Iseult and her husband, Francis Stuart (1902 - 2000), which had successfully outraged Irish Catholic piety. This was a deliberate strategy: Yeats also contributed an anonymous editorial, designed to provoke the self-righteous. From the early days of the new Irish Free State he set himself up as the scourge of artistic and literary censorship, not always with the approval of fellow protestants who preferred not to rock the boat. Though the Yeatses first lived in Oxford after their marriage, George had encouraged her husband's instinct to return to Ireland and from early 1922 they divided their time between a Dublin town house and the tower at Ballylee. The Irish civil war rumbled in the background, and i.

The Tower is a book of poems by W. B. Yeats, published in 1928. The collection is viewed as one of the poet's most important, containing some of his most famous poems, such as 'Sailing to Byzantium,' 'Leda and the Swan,' and 'Among School Children.' The Tower furthered Yeats's meditations on aging, the creative process, and the nature of the physical and the spiritual world.