THE CELTIC TWILIGHT by Yeats, William Butler - 1902

London: A.H. Bullen, 1902. Blue cloth, elaborately stamped in gilt after a design by Althea Gyles, untrimmed. Edges and endsheets moderately foxed, light rubbing to extremities, else very good. First printing of the revised and enlarged edition, in the primary binding. One of two thousand copies printed. Inscribed in the month of publication: "To Lady Gregory from WB Yeats July 7 1902." There is one word insertion in the poem on page 235 in Yeats' hand. Lady Gregory recorded the circumstances of her first meeting with Yeats, and the birth of a friendship central to modern Irish literary history in 'Our Irish Theatre': "On one of those days at Duras in 1898, Mr. Edward Martyn, my neighbour, came to see the Count (de Basterot), bringing with him Mr.Yeats, whom I did not then know very well, though I cared for his work very much and had already, through his directions, been gathering folk-lore. They had lunch with us, but it was a wet day, and we could not go out. After a while I thought the Count wanted to talk to Mr. Martyn alone; so I took Mr. Yeats to the office where the steward used to come to talk, ­less about business I think than of the Land War or the state of the country, or the last year's deaths and marriages from Kinvara to the headland of Aughanish. We sat there through that wet afternoon, and though I had never been at all interested in theatres, our talk turned on plays. Mr. Martyn had written two, The Heather Field and Maeve. They had been offered to London managers, and now he thought of trying to have them produced in Germany where there seemed to be more room for new drama than in England. I said it was a pity we had no Irish theatre where such plays could be given. Mr. Yeats said that had always been a dream of his, but he had of late thought it an impossible one, for it could not at first pay its way, and there was no money to be found for such a thing in Ireland. We went on talking about it, and things seemed to grow possible as we talked, and before the end of the afternoon we had made our plan. We said we would collect money, or rather ask to have a certain sum of money guaranteed. We would then take a Dublin theatre and give a performance of Mr. Martyn's Heather Field and one of Mr. Yeats's own plays, 'The Countess Cathleen'. I offered the first guarantee of £25." WADE 35.