Responsibilities

The Cornell Yeats edition of the poetry collection, Responsibilities, features the only surviving example of Ezra Pound and the author collaboratively revising a poem by Yeats. Working on a set of page proofs of "The Two Kings"-one of the poems in the volume-while they shared Stone Cottage in Sussex during the winter of 1913-1914, Pound wrote proposed revisions and Yeats then reacted to them, accepting some, changing some, and rejecting some. This process of collaborative revision is a precursor of Pound's more extensive marking, nearly a decade later, of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Responsibilities is also of particular interest for its inclusion of a group of poems written about the highly public controversy over the attempts to build a Dublin Modern Art Gallery. Yeats wrote a long, detailed note in 1914 to explain the political background of the poems in this volume. The drafts of the note's sometimes caustic phrasing have survived and are included here.