The Tower: A Facsimile Edition [Paperback]

The first edition of W. B. Yeats'sThe Towerappeared in bookstores in London on Valentine's Day, 1928. His English publisher printed just 2,000 copies of this slender volume of twenty-one poems, priced at six shillings. The book was immediately embraced by book buyers and critics alike, and it quickly became a bestseller.
Subsequent versions of the volume made various changes throughout, but this Scribner facsimile edition reproduces exactly that seminal first edition as it reached its earliest audience in 1928, adding an introduction and notes by esteemed Yeats scholar Richard J. Finneran.
Written between 1912 and 1927, these poems ( Sailing to Byzantium, Leda and the Swan, and Among School Children among them) are today considered some of the best and most famous in the entire Yeats canon. As Virginia Woolf declared in her unsigned review of this collection, Mr. Yeats has never written more exactly and more passionately. Introduction

A last-minute shopper entering a London bookstore on Valentine's Day in 1928 with six shillings to spend on a gift for his or her beloved could hardly have made a better investment -- either poetically or financially -- than one of the 2,000 copies of a volume Macmillan & Co. had published that morning:The Towerby W. B. Yeats. Twenty-one poems in 104 pages; six pages of notes; olive green cloth with a design by T. Sturge Moore stamped in gold on front and spine, also reproduced on the dust jacket. No illustrations, no book club dividends: simply one of the seminal volumes of Modern Poetry, indeed of poetry in English as we know it. Doubtless not every lyric is a masterpiece, but how often have we been given between two covers such monuments of magnificence as Sailing to Byzantium, Leda and the Swan, and Among School Children -- not to mention The Tower, Meditations in Time of Civil War, Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen, or Two Songs from a Play ? A thing never known again, indeel³.