Conflicted Legacies: Yeats’s Intentions and Editorial Theory

SOMETHING INTENDED, COMPLETE Biographers have addressed the fullness of Yeats’s life, but his self-fashioning and self-mythologizing compel a parallel task, the biography of his books. Biblio-biography is often confined to the biography of a single book, but Yeats was a pleromatist. Committed to oeuvre throughout his life, he updated his collected works as a self-image, and his canon-formations involved the relegation of works which did not fit his idea of a Collected Works as a ‘permanent se..