“Yeats and The Wild Swans at Coole, 1917, 1919: from tempest to comfort”

This article analyses the two editions of The Wild Swans at Coole, published in 1917 and 1919. It first introduces the poet’s troubled life at the time. The 1917 volume is full of despair from a sentimental, but also from an imaginative point of view, while the later volume is more heterogeneous, as the poet subtly places the older poems together with more recent ones which express joy, newly-found imaginative strength, as well as love poems for his wife. The article closes examining the reasons for Yeats’s choice as to the position of poems in the 1919 edition as well as taking into consideration some coeval poems Yeats decided to set aside for later volumes.