YEATS, W.B. The Winding Stair and Other Poems. London: Macmillan & Co. 1933.
8vo. Original green cloth with famous design by T. Sturge Moore stamped in gilt on spine and in blind on upper cover; pages untrimmed and partially unopened; green paper dust wrapper with Moore's pictorial design and advertisements to rear wrapper; pp. x, 101, [3]; minor offsetting to final blank; otherwise near fine.
An advance review copy with uncut pages and "Advance Review Copy Special Notice" tipped-in on title page with a stamped publication date specified for 19 September 1933.
T.S. Eliot- "Yeats whose history is the history of their own time, who are a part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them".
A rare volume of poetry from W.B. Yeats' later years, published when he was sixty-eight, The Winding Stair is the legendary poet's most extensive stand-alone publication, succeeding The Tower, with which it converses. The collection is dedicated to Edmund Dulac.
An ancient Norman tower in County Galway which Yeats bought and christened with the Gaelicized name Thoor Ballylee Castle proved to be the inspiration for the collection's title. For the poet, Thoor Ballylee represented a crucial bond to the aristocratic Irish past which he so respected. The Winding Stair features some of the poet's most renowned works including poems from the earlier book of the same name published in 1929 by the Fountain Press in New York. Notably, the volume features "Byzantium", a sequel to "Sailing to Byzantium" and an excavation of the relationship between the spiritual and physical worlds. "Winding Stair" is itself employed as a phrase in the third poem of the collection, "A Dialogue of Self and Soul" which concerns the dynamic between Yeats' soul and his own self "My Soul. I summon to the winding ancient stair; /Set all your mind upon the steep ascent…".
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