Welcome to the Tower!
This project aims to track how Yeats’ 1928 volume The Tower was assembled, following the volume’s individual poems from their first publication to their placement in The Tower. Our intention is to challenge the idea that there is one stable, fixed text of The Tower. Rather, Yeats’s poetry is constantly evolving and gaining new context with each publication. Through tracking this evolution, we can learn something about Yeats’s views of mass-production and modern, capitalist ideas of the text as product.
This website was designed by SUNY Geneseo students Matt Albanese, Cindy Castillo, and Jennifer Galvao as the final project for our English class, Enterprises: Editing Yeats. This class aims to use digital tools to enhance our understanding of Yeats as a poet and as an obsessive revisor.
We would like to offer special thanks to the exhibit The Life and Works of William Butler Yeats, featured on The National Library of Ireland’s website, as well as to our professors Dr. Rob Doggett and Dr. Paul Schacht for their guidance and advice.