W.B. Yeats | Celtic Twilight, 1905, first Irish edition, with letters by by Yeats inserted

W.B. Yeats

Two autograph letters signed, to the poet, playwright and novelist Winifred M. Letts

discussing her plays submitted to the Abbey Theatre, giving extended thoughts on dramaturgy ("...A good play must have truth of atmosphere..."), expressing his admiration of Balzac, and also writing of "wonderfully beautiful" Lough Gill, site of the Lake Isle of Innisfree ("...I once walked round Lough Gill & started, as night fell, trying to sleep in a wood & getting back to Sligo half dead for lack of sleep and fatigue at noon the next day. I remember the rabbits at sundown & a little after sunrise..."), 7 pages, 8vo, 24 February and 25 March, n.y., Nassau Hotel, Dublin (one on Coole Park headed stationery), the final page of the second letter browned and with adhesive stain to margin[the letters laid in to]: Celtic Twilight. Dublin: Maunsel and Co., Ltd., 1905. First Irish edition, 8vo, author portrait frontispiece, 235pp plus 4pp publisher's advertisements at end, ephemera pasted in, including postcard of Lough Gill, Co. Sligo, and newspaper clipping with photographic portrait of Lady Gregory, publisher's green cloth, spine lettered in gilt, leaves uncut, author portrait frontispiece detached, upper hinge splitting, extremities rubbed

"...take any life you know & express its reality as your own eyes have seen that reality..."

Winifred Letts (1882-1972) was a poet, novelist and playwright who spent most of her adult life in Ireland. She wrote several one-act plays that were performed at the Abbey Theatre beginning with The Eyes of the Blind in 1907. In the first of these two letters, Yeats explains why he had rejected a play she had submitted: "the dialogue is often very good but the plot is too far from life". In a long and encouraging postscript he gives her detailed advice on dramaturgy: "If you would found your work as much as possible on real life you would find it is at once easier to write and more powerful in structure". She should avoid the influence of "authors who keep on the surface"; "I am myself", Yeats continues, "going to school to Balzac & have in the last few months read some thirty of his forty volumes", and has found much of relevance to Ireland in Balzac's "description of provincial life". 

Letts seems to have replied to Yeats with fresh ideas for plays, and the second letter appears to be Yeats's response. He encourages her to continue to develop at least two ideas for plays, repeats his injunction that a play must contain truth - "it is a good subject if you can keep it real" - and also encourages her towards nationalist themes: "The other subject that of the vicarage is good I think if you can make the struggle between father and daughter subject to obvious Irish conditions."