A search for authority : prolegomena to a definitive critical edition of W. B. Yeat's A Vision (1937)

The groundwork is laid in this project for the text of a definitive critical edition of A Vision (1937). Some twenty-one thousand pages of unpublished materials have been examined in order to chart Yeats's process of creating the book, its publishing history, the critical reception, and the interrelationships of the various manuscripts and texts from the automatic writing of 1917 to the 1962 state of the printed text, Instead of a new text of A Vision, a list of emendations to the London 1937 copy-text is given. All known marginalia written in copies of the first edition and various states of the second edition in the hands of Yeats, his wife, and Thomas Mark (his editor at Macmillan) are listed, Textual notes explain the sources of the emendations and point out cruces and interesting A chapter on the "Manuscript" discusses in detail the materials which Yeats sent to the printers, in the printed texts of 1937 (London), 1938 (New York), 1956 (New York), 1961 (London), and 1962 ((London) are listed in a chapter of historical collations. A final chapter on word division lists end-line hyphenation. The bibliography contains four separate lists: published and unpublished primary and secondary materials which were consulted for this project.