YEATS, W. B.

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The Collected Works in Verse And Prose. First collected edition, one of 1,060 sets printed at the Shakespeare Head Press.The poet was particularly fond of the frontispieces by John Sargent, Mancini, Shannon, and J. B. Yeats, writing to his friend John Quinn, "nobody will believe they are the same man and I shall write an essay upon them and describe them as all the different personages that I have dreamt of being, but have never had the time for" (ODNB).This set comprises the poet's own selection and arrangement, a substantially complete corpus (poems, plays and prose) of his first canon of work, before the finding of his later voice. Sales were slow and the majority of the edition was later issued in a secondary, cheaper cloth binding.Another 250 sets in the same binding were issued simultaneously with the Chapman & Hall imprint on the spines and title pages.

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