3 OCTOBER 1925, Page 31

Messrs. Macmillan publish in one volume the Early Poems and

Stories of Mr. W. B. Yeats. Mr. Yeats has written a short preface, in which he says :—

"I tried . . . to write nothing but emotion, and in the simplest language, and now I have had to go through it all, cutting out or altering passages that are sentimental from lack of thought. Are we not always doomed to see our world as the Stoics foretold, con- sumed alternately by fire and water. Upon the other hand, I cannot have altogether failed in simplicity, for these poems, written before my seven-and-twentieth year, are still the most popular that I have written."

It is a strange fate that Mr. Yeats, sighing for the past of the world, should have cause also to sigh for his own past.

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