J. B. Yeats’s Marginalia in The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems

Abstract

THE PUBLICATION IN 1889 of The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems enhanced W.B. Yeats’s growing reputation and, as a sign of the twenty-four-year-old poet’s productivity and promise, gratified his father.1 But the son’s achievement was galling, also, since it came at a time when the father’s career had stalled. At fifty-one, John Butler Yeats’s achievement as a painter was modest and he was descending into chronic financial dependency on his family and friends. JBY’s biographer observes that as ‘Willy was rising to prominence … John Butler Yeats came as close to emotional breakdown as it was possible to do without going over the edge.’2 JBY always remembered this as a time of ‘incessant humiliation’.3 His son’s new book had the effect of further marginalising him and it was in its margins that he asserted himself.