Illustrating Yeats

Abstract This chapter discusses the illustration of Yeats’s poetry and prose across his writing life as he moved publishers from Charles Kegan Paul to T. Fisher Unwin, to the Cuala Press, and to Macmillan. Yeats revised and refined his aesthetic preferences from photomechanically reproduced narrative paintings to Celtic interlace designs, symbolist flora and fauna to line work inspired by Byzantine mosaics, and abstract, geometrical renderings that aligned with his mythography of gyres and historical cycles. The chapter begins with Yeats’s earliest illustrated poems for magazines decorated by his brother, Jack Yeats, before turning to the poet’s more sustained collaboration with Althea Gyles for Unwin book covers at the turn of century, including The Secret Rose. The third section discusses the minimalist decorative aesthetic of Dun Emer and the Cuala Press, and the extent to which Yeats favoured a more restrained and uniform design identity to his books in later years. The fourth section traces Yeats’s correspondence and collaboration with Norah McGuinness and T. Sturge Moore on some of his most iconic book covers for Macmillan. His growing interest in geometry and the aesthetics of Byzantine mosaics in the 1920s inform several of these covers, including The Tower, The Winding Stair, and the Stories of Red Hanrahan and the Secret Rose. With the selection of new artists and livery to cover old books, illustration afforded Yeats an opportunity to step backwards in history to an abstract or symbolic phase of art that was antiquated and yet strikingly modern and refreshing.