I have tried be selective in the links given here, limiting them to those that seem genuinely useful. A search with a general search engine will provide plenty more, as will some of the links provided by pages listed here. If you have any suggestions for links to sites or pages you have found particularly helpful, please send them to me. Links change and fade with surprising speed and if any of the links here no longer works, let me know.
General Resources
The National Library of Ireland—Leabharlann Náisiúnta na hÉireann has mounted Beyond that, of particular interest is the catalogue of Yeats’s Occult Papers as Acrobat pdf, compiled by Peter Kenny, and including the Automatic Script, which is cross-referenced to Yeats’s 'Vision' Papers. The Yeatses’ library is now housed at the National Library, and there is a new catalogue of this available at The W.B. and George Yeats Library: A Short-Title Catalog which can be viewed on-line or downloaded as a PDF file. This catalogue was compiled by Wayne K. Chapman and is hosted at Clemson University in South Carolina.
NEW One of the fullest resources available is Bruce Stewart's site, Ricorso.net, an Irish literature resource, which includes a very full chronology, list of works and bibliography, extracts from criticism and longer extracts from notable works both by and on Yeats, as well as plenty more. You can access an alphabetical list here and navigate from there. It is text-heavy and minimal in presentation, but does so for speed of loading and fullness—see here for a summary of the resources and approach.
Similar, and apparently deriving from the same original project, but far more limited, is the The Princess Grace Irish Library, EIRData (Electronic Irish Records Dataset). Less user-friendly in terms of presentation than Ricorso, it is compact and full, but currently (July 2009) confined to a single page with a briefer biographical outline for Yeats, works and criticism all crammed in. You can access the Yeats material via the alphabetical datasets index, though with luck this link should get you there directly and, since it's all on a single page, losing the navigating frames is not such a loss. NEW In 2008 the US National Endowment for the Humanities sponsored an Institute for College and University Teachers, "W.B. Yeats: A Reassessment", a four-week-long discussion and meeting on Yeats in Ireland. This produced a Final Report which gives an interesting and useful survey of the situation of Yeats studies at present. Section III is on "A Vision and the System". Warren Wedin’s Seminar Resources for his course at California State University, Northridge; his own listing of critical material, divided into books, journal articles, and articles in books is particularly good, last updated in 2002. The Yeats Society of New York’s page of Web Resources is particularly comprehensive. The Open Directory Project, "dmoz", itself a set of further links. The Yeats Society Sligo, including information on the Yeats International Summer Schools. The Australian Yeats Society’s Beyond Ben Bulben page. Frank L. Ludwig’s photographs of Yeats country gives pictures of the Sligo countryside evoked in the poetry, such as Ben Bulben, Knocknarea and the Hawk’s Well. The full visual index is slow to load but offers a beautiful survey in itself.
The best chronology is John Kelly’s A W. B. Yeats Chronology. This single volume is based upon the chronologies at the beginnings of the separate volumes of the Collected Letters (general editor, John Kelly), where detailed entries appear for the years covered by the volume in question, and a broader outline for the rest of Yeats’s life. The chronology given on this site (in the Overview) is mainly drawn from this. A chronology of Yeats's life, a clearer outline perhaps, compiled by Sam McCready. When dealing with texts, there are many problems with web editions. The very best are excellent and have the added advantage of being searchable, but are still not as easily or reliably referred to as a printed book. If you refer to a site and the page has gone, for whatever reason, it does not have quite the same currency as even the most out-of-print book. Unfortunately few on-line texts are excellent. Many are good, having been put up by projects such as Project Gutenberg, which has standards of proof-reading, and the same goes for many other sites, including those of public-minded enthusiasts. There is still the problem that there is usually no indication of editorial principles, the actual provenance of the text or copy-text and what variants might be involved. They provide a great service and are very useful in providing a reading text, but not a substitute for the book at a scholarly level. It is not always easy to distinguish the good sites, though, from the rather poor sites. Rather poor sites are technically accurate for spelling etc. but often have cuts or don't indicate that they are only part of a text. In this sense rather poor sites can be more dangerous that really poor sites. And when you are dealing with literature, really poor, meaning mis-spellings, mis-scannings, missing words, lines or paragraphs, is really appalling. California State University, Northridge, poems arranged by volume and arranged by title. PoemHunter.com’s searchable collection, which also has a .PDF collection for download. The Literature Network’s Online Literature: Yeats, gives texts of better-known poems. ReadBookOnLine.net includes some of the short fiction (may only work in Explorer). Warren Wedin’s Seminar Resources for his course at California State University, Northridge, lists critical material, divided into books, journal articles, and articles in books, last updated in 2002. The Yeats Annual, edited by Warwick Gould.Further Links
Chronologies
Poetry on-line
Critical material