This volume presents previously unpublished manuscript drafts of two key early dramatic poems by W. B. Yeats, comprising over half the extant manuscripts of his poetry written through 1895.

From reviews of The Cornell Yeats series:

"For students of Yeats the whole series is bound to become an essential reference source and a stimulus to important critical re-readings of Yeats's major works. In a wider context, the series will also provide an extraordinary and perhaps unique insight into the creative process of a great artists."―Irish Literary Supplement

"I consider the Cornell Yeats one of the most important scholarly projects of our time."―A. Walton Litz, Princeton University, coeditor of The Collected Poems of William Carols Williams and Personae: The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound

"The most ambitious of the many important projects in current studies of Yeats and perhaps of modern poetry generally. . . . The list of both general and series editors, as well as prospective preparers of individual volumes, reads like a Who's Who of Yeats textual studies in North America. Further, the project carries the blessing of Yeats's heirs and bespeaks an ongoing commitment from a major university press. . . . The series will inevitably engender critical studies based on a more solid footing than those of any other modern poet. . . . Its volumes will be consulted long after gyres of currently fashionable theory have run on."―Yeats Annual (1983)