From reviews of The Cornell Yeats series:
"For students of Yeats the whole series is bound to become an essential reference source and a stimulus to important critical re-readings of Yeats's major works. In a wider context, the series will also provide an extraordinary and perhaps unique insight into the creative process of a great artists."—Irish Literary Supplement
"I consider the Cornell Yeats one of the most important scholarly projects of our time."—A. Walton Litz, Princeton University, coeditor of The Collected Poems of William Carols Williams and Personae: The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound
"The most ambitious of the many important projects in current studies of Yeats and perhaps of modern poetry generally.... The list of both general and series editors, as well as prospective preparers of individual volumes, reads like a Who's Who of Yeats textual studies in North America. Further, the project carries the blessing of Yeats's heirs and bespeaks an ongoing commitment from a major university press.... The series will inevitably engender critical studies based on a more solid footing than those of any other modern poet.... Its volumes will be consulted long after gyres of currently fashionable theory have run on."—Yeats Annual (1983)
This volume presents the surviving manuscripts, typescripts, and early printed texts for all of the poems W. B. Yeats included at one time or another in two remarkably significant and protean collections: In the Seven Woods, first published in 1903, and The Green Helmet and Other Poems, first published in 1910. It also documents the extant early record for seven poems Yeats wrote between 1899 and 1914 but either never published or never attached to one of his plays or collections of poems. During this crucial period in his career, Yeats transformed himself from a talented late-Victorian aesthete to a major modernist poet. The photographs and transcriptions provided here reveal much about how this remarkable change occurred. They are accompanied by ample supporting materials, including a descriptive bibliography of the manuscripts and an extensive critical introduction.
