Responsibilities

From reviews of The Cornell Yeats series:

"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)

The Cornell Yeats edition of the poetry collection Responsibilities features the only surviving example of Ezra Pound and the author collaboratively revising a poem by Yeats. Working on a set of page proofs of "The Two Kings"—one of the poems in the volume—while they shared Stone Cottage in Sussex during the winter of 1913–1914, Pound wrote proposed revisions and Yeats then reacted to them, accepting some, changing some, and rejecting some. This process of collaborative revision is a precursor of Pound's more extensive marking, nearly a decade later, of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land.

Responsibilities is also of particular interest for its inclusion of a group of poems written about the highly public controversy over the attempts to build a Dublin Modern Art Gallery. Yeats wrote a long, detailed note in 1914 to explain the political background of the poems in this volume. The drafts of the note's sometimes caustic phrasing have survived and are included here.

William H. O'Donnell is Professor of English at the University of Memphis. He is the author of The Poetry of William Butler Yeats: An Introduction and A Guide to the Prose Fiction of W. B. Yeats and has edited several editions of Yeats's work.