EDITOR's Note

on the Genesis of the Collection for the 1913 Cuala Press Edition

At the time of the poet's death, on April 3, 1913, a fairly ambitious body of lyric poetry had been gathered and sorted in various ways. Part of this new work was directed to the enlarged posthumous edition of Poems (London: Dent, 1914), under the rubric “Miscellaneous Poems of Later Dates,” as presented above. TCD MS. 3120 seems to have provided copy text for that particular enhancement. Generally speaking, the arrangement and editing of those verses was almost entirely the work of Dowden's second wife, Elizabeth Dickinson West Dowden (usually signed either “E.D.W.” or “E.D.D.” to distinguish her initials from that of her husband. Aside from a few poems that remain unpublished to this day, the majority had been been gathered together for the collection eventually called A Woman's Reliquary (WR1913), when ElizabeThyeats, in honor of Dowden's long friendship wiThyeats père, John Butler Yeats, agreed to print 300 copies of the book on the letterpress without the consent of her brother, Cuala Press executive editor W. B. Yeats. Th ree extant manuscript notebooks provide evidence of the means by which copy text was produced for the Cuala Press edition, seemingly without a typescript.

The genesis of copy text for A Woman's Reliquary began with a bound notebook (TCD MS. 3122, green leather, limp) containing poems in fair hand, evidently copied out and given to E.D.D. as a love token. In place of a title for the collection is a pressed sprig of greenery (flora), tipped in beneath the inscription: “Fons Signatus.” On the verso of this leaf is the quatrain selected as the verse epigraph for A Woman's Reliquary. The poems thereafter are numbered, untitled, and all fair copies. There are but 74 (I–LXXIV) poems, with 14 “Additions” listed, beginning on numbered folio “48” and running to the last entry on folio 59. Copies are entered on rectos only, save for the verse epigraph. Thereafter, the order of the poems diff ers signifi cantly. Directions are given in the “Additions” section for placement of poems within the numbered sequence of the notebook.