Yeats’s Singing-School

From the outset Yeats was a poet almost as invested in revision as he was in vision. The manuscripts show that all the early dream-laden works involved concerted labour, and indeed ‘labour’ turns out to be one of their preoccupations. In the later quasi-orientalist ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, Yeats appealed to the notion of a ‘singing-school’ for poetry based on ‘studying monuments of its own magnificence’. Like the later work, Yeats’s early poems are elaborately shaped and aesthetically developed, and the surviving manuscript drafts and revisions give us a privileged glimpse into his own ‘singing-school’ during the years he was labouring to create his voice, his characteristic self-images, and his iconography and style.