YEATS, W. B.

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Poems. First edition, one of 750 copies, here with a gift inscription from the arts patron and banker Leo Frank Schuster. His daughter, Adela Schuster, was a major supporter of Oscar Wilde and continued providing him financial assistance during his imprisonment. The recipient was Julia Charlotee Sophia, Marchioness of Tweeddale.Yeats was meticulous over virtually every aspect of his first collected edition. The poems, selected from previous individual collections, were carefully revised. He approved the paper, ordered the edges be rough, and instructed "no headlines, the number of the page to be at the bottom, & single commas for quotation marks"."In [his] early books, two forces are endlessly at play: Yeats's desire for an individual personality for his books and the limitations of the market. As early as 1895 he wanted a collected works, and a uniform edition of all of his books which none of his publishers could afford. Poems (1895) represents his first attempt at uniform size, shape and typography... It was an act of self-definition" (Gould, pp. 29-30). The book was pivotal in Yeats's career for symbolizing "an important stage in the development of his public self", and for bringing Yeats more money over three decades than "all my other books put together" (Foster, I, p. 152).The volume prints poems from the collections The Rose and The Crossways, including "The Stolen Child" and "The Lake Isle of Innisfree", along with the epic poem "The Wanderings of Oisin" and the play

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