The Winding Stair and Other Poems

Book excerpt: An exact facsimile of the 1933 first edition of W.B. Yeats’s The Winding Stair and Other Poems, a famously beautiful, elegant volume intended as a companion to The Tower—with an Introduction and notes by the eminent Yeats scholar George Bornstein. Published in 1933 when W.B. Yeats was sixty-eight, The Winding Stair and Other Poems is his longest stand-alone volume of verse. Previously unavailable as a single volume, this beautiful edition will appeal to both general readers and textual scholars. Featuring sixty-four poems from the late 1920s and early 1930s, among them such masterpieces as “Blood and the Moon,” “Byzantium,” the Coole Park poems, “Vacillation,” and two separately titled long sequences including the Crazy Jane poems and ending with the exquisite lyric “From the ‘Antigone,’” this edition also includes an Introduction and notes by celebrated Yeats scholar George Bornstein. These poems amply justify T. S. Eliot’s contention that Yeats was one of the few poets “whose history is the history of their own time, who are a part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them.”