Five recent contributions to Yeats studies—Finneran's new edition of The Poems, Jeffares's New Commentary keyed to this edition, the second volume of the Yeats Annual (also edited by Finneran), Steinman's Yeats's Heroic Figures and the late Paul de Man's The Rhetoric of Romanticism (nearly half of which treats Yeats and his traditions in some form)—all make provocative reading. Finneran and Jeffares, for example, are locked in an intellectually fierce, if politely staged, scholarly debate over the appropriate ordering of Yeats’ poems. Finneran favors the division of the poems into lyrical, narrative and dramatic sections perpetuated by the previous, so-called “Definitive” edition of the Collected Poems. Jeffares prefers a strictly chronological ordering that would begin with The Wandering of Oisin and include narrative and dramatic poems interspersed among the famous lyrics according to the actual shape of the career.

Yeats himself, of course, was of two minds on the matter, wanting separate editions of his work: both a multivolume limited edition deluxe for the initiated, and for the “people,” a single volume edition arranged as Finneran has for the most part arranged things. Finneran has included many uncollected poems and poems only available in the Variorum edition of the poetry; most of these would not be to Yeats's liking here, one suspects, since they are indeed quite minor. To Finneran's credit, however, he has also restored what became Last Poems to the order Yeats originally intended, having the career close not with “Under Ben Bulben” and its heroic pose but with “Politics” and its rueful lament for an old man's lost opportunities for youthful passion. This debate between Jeffares and Finneran has the effect of making one reconsider Yeats and the shape of his career and try out both possible versions: Yeats as master-maker of lyric volumes and Yeats in the process of slowly, painfully progressing to that status, with many wayward side trips into such things as The Shadowy Waters and its many rewritings. Such controversy can only help stimulate new studies of the poetry informed by ever finer scholarly discriminations. But for a more detailed account of this debate and other related matters of textual analysis, see Finneran's Editing Yeats's Poems.

Even Steinman's Yeats's Heroic Figures and the second volume of Yeats Annual contribute to these delightful revisionary prospects. I say “even” because the habitual expectation we have concerning strictly scholarly studies is of rigorous dullness.