The New York Public Library Acquires Important--Largely Unpublished--W. B. Yeats Manuscripts

Photograph of W.B. Yeats, from the inside front cover of The New York Public Library's recently acquired manuscript album. The Berg Collection.

New York, NY, July 15, 2005 -- The New York Public Library has acquired a manuscript album of highly significant and largely unpublished papers by the Irish poet and dramatist W. B. Yeats (1865-1939), generally regarded as one of the greatest poets of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was announced by Paul LeClerc, President of The New York Public Library and David Ferriero, Director and CEO of The Research Libraries of The New York Public Library. The album was acquired on July 12 at an auction at Sotheby's in London.

"The New York Public Library is extremely pleased that it has become the home of this extraordinary group of papers and that scholars of Yeats, as well as historians of the Abbey Theatre and the Irish Literary Renaissance, can come from around the world to study them in the context of the Library's rich supporting holdings," said President LeClerc.

The green goatskin album, with gilt tooled spine, is signed by the celebrated Arts and Crafts binder Katharine Adams and was the property of Sydney Cockerell, the highly influential design binder, Kelmscott Press Secretary, and Fitzwilliam Museum Director. "The album will become part of The New York Public Library's Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature," said David Ferriero. "Among the Berg's many literary treasures is one of the world's largest collections of Yeats manuscripts and correspondence."

Chief among the album's contents is the unpublished, first draft version, replete with Yeats's hand-written emendations, excisions, and additions, of "The Tragic Theatre." The essay presents in fullest form his theories of drama and pictorial art and explores the ways in which these may be most fully realized through the use of symbolic scenery, masks, and dance. The essay first appeared in the literary periodical The Mask (Florence, October 1910), published by Edward Gordon Craig, who had designed several sets for Dublin's Abbey Theatre, of which Yeats was the Director from its founding, in 1904, until shortly before his death, and for which Yeats wrote most of his plays. The essay was first published in book form in his collection of literary essays The Cutting of an Agate (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1912; London: Macmillan and Company, 1919 ) though large portions of it had been used in the preface to a collection of plays called Plays for an Irish Theatre (London and Stratford-upon-Avon: A. H. Bullen, 1911).

"'The Tragic Theatre' manuscript is a particularly apt addition to the Berg Collection," said Isaac Gewirtz, curator of the Berg, "not only because of its strong Yeats holdings, but because it houses Yeats's substantially revised typescript of 'The Tragic Theatre,' for which this heavily revised manuscript served as the first draft. Scholars will be most eager to compare the contents and revisions of the two documents."

Also of great interest are two groups of correspondence: eighteen signed letters by Yeats to Cockerell, ten of which are unpublished, and one, also signed and unpublished, by Yeats to William Robertson Nicoll, the literary adviser to the publisher Hodder & Stoughton, who had requested a photograph of a portrait of the poet by the Italian painter Antonio Mancini (1852-1930); and three unpublished letters and a postcard to Cockerell from Lady Gregory, the chief patron of the Irish Literary Renaissance and of Yeats, and who was also his collaborator in the writing of several plays. In the correspondence to Cockerell, she discusses various Abbey productions, and in one letter, invites him (as she had a group of others) to donate £1 toward a surprise birthday gift for Yeats--a copy of the Kelmscott Press Chaucer, a book, she says, that the poet "covets."

These letters will join, in the Berg, the world's largest collection of Lady Gregory's correspondence, including over 750 letters from her to Yeats, and nearly 1,300 from Yeats to her. The album also includes the leaves from the issue of The Mask containing "The Tragic Theatre" and a group of letters to Cockerell from Charles Aitken, Director of the Tate, concerning the Hugh Lane bequest, which, in 1908, established Dublin's Municipal Gallery of Modern Art (the bequest had been scorned by the Dublin cultural establishment, but its cause was championed by Yeats). Affixed to the inside cover is a dramatic and rare photograph of Yeats in profile.

The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature was established at The New York Public Library on October 11, 1940. A gift of Albert Berg (1872-1950) in memory of his brother Henry (1858-1938), eminent physicians at Mt. Sinai Hospital, it included some 3,500 volumes of rare editions of English and American literature, as well as an endowment for the collection's housing and development. Subsequent large purchases by Albert Berg and purchases made possible by his bequest, as well as the generous gifs of generations of donors, have increased the collection's size to 30,000 rare books and 2,000 linear feet of literary manuscripts and archives, including journals, diaries, correspondence, and photographs, representing the work and lives of more than 400 authors. Printed books date from William Caxton's 1480 edition of the Chronicles of England to the present day, and the manuscripts encompass an almost equally lengthy period, though the most extensive manuscript holdings date from the period 1820-1980. Among the many notable authors included are Charles Dickens, Henry James, Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and Saul Bellow. The Berg is also home to the archives of Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, Terry Southern, and Kenneth Koch, among other important writers and poets.

Exhibitions featuring the Berg Collection's holdings are mounted at the Library, in the D. Samuel and Jeane H. Gottesman Exhibition Hall and in the Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III Gallery, and presentations of selected materials are regularly offered to undergraduate and graduate classes in English and American literature. Each year, scholars from across the country and around the world conduct research at the Berg, publishing scores of articles and books based on its resources.

The New York Public Library was created in 1895 with the consolidation of the private libraries of John Jacob Astor and James Lenox with the Samuel Jones Tilden Trust. The Library provides free and open access to its physical and electronic collections and information, as well as to its services. It comprises four research centers - the Humanities and Social Sciences Library; The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; and the Science, Industry and Business Library - and 85 Branch Libraries in Manhattan, Staten Island, and the Bronx. Research and circulating collections combined total more than 50 million items, including materials for the visually impaired. In addition, each year the Library presents thousands of exhibitions and public programs, which include classes in technology, literacy, and English as a second language. The Library serves some 13 million patrons who come through its doors annually and another 13 million users internationally, who access collections and services through the NYPL website.

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Contact: Herb Scher | Tim Farrell   212.704.8600