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Creator
Yeats, W. B. (William Butler), 1865-1939
Call number
Berg Coll MSS Yeats, WB
Physical description
ca. 3,125 items
Preferred Citation

[Identification of the item]. The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library.

Repository
Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Access to materials
Request an in-person research appointment.
Portions of this collection have been digitized and are available online.

This is a synthetic collection consisting of manuscripts and typescripts, correspondence, notebooks, and portraits.

Biographical/historical information

William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet, playwright, and essayist, and the cofounder of the Irish Literary Theatre.

Scope and arrangement

This is a synthetic collection consisting of manuscripts and typescripts, correspondence, notebooks, and portraits. The manuscripts comprise holograph poems, drafts and fragments of which some were published in his Collected Poems in 1951; drafts of the introductions to works by Rabindranath Tagore, Lady Gregory, and Dorothy Wellesley; drafts and notes to plays; and fragments and notebooks for "The Shadowy Waters." The typescripts include typewritten drafts of poems, plays, and essays with the author's and Lady Gregory's manuscript emendations. Also included are typescripts of essays about the author by W. H. Auden, Mary Colum, T. S. Eliot, and May Sarton. The portraits are original drawings of Yeats by George William Russell and John Butler Yeats. The correspondence, dating from [1888] to 1939, comprises letters from the author to Padraic Colum, Lady Beatrice Child Villiers Dunsany, Lord Edward Dunsany, Ford Madox Ford, Lady Gregory, Violet Hunt, John O'Leary, Una Pope-Hennessey, Clement King Shorter, Humbert Wolfe, and others. Also present are letters related to Yeats, dating from 1897 to [1965], from Sir Edmund William Gosse to Lady Gregory, from Richard Jennings to Edith Sitwell, from George William Russell to Lady Gregory, and from Jack Butler Yeats to Ria Mooney, and other correspondence related to the author. There are letters to Yeats from Sara Allgood, William F. Bailey, Padraic Colum, Ellen Duncan, St. John Greer Ervine, William G. Fay, Lady Gregory, Stephen Gwynn, Annie Elizabeth Fredericka Horniman, Maud Gonne MacBride, John Masefield, George Moore, Lennox Robinson, George William Russell, Bernard Shaw, John Millington Synge, and others, dating from 1876-1934.

The William Butler Yeats collection of papers are arranged in three series:

Administrative information

Custodial history

Former owners include W. T. H. Howe, Lady Gregory, J. S. Watson, Sara Allgood, Ria Mooney, the Group Theatre archive, and Nash's Pall Mall magazine. Some materials contain W. Van R. Whitall's bookplate and John Quinn's bookplate. The typescript of the play, "The Land of Heart's Desire" was a gift of Anne Fremantle.

Source of acquisition

This is a synthetic collection, created from materials acquired through gift and purchase from various sources.

Processing information

Processed by Staff; Machine-readable finding aid created by Lynn Lobash and Nina Schneider.

Using the collection

Location

Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Stephen A. Schwarzman Building
Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street, New York, NY 10018-2788
Third Floor, Room 320

Conditions Governing Use

For permission to publish, contact the Curator, The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature