The goal of this digital collection is to provide a unique, versatile reading experience for those interested in William Butler Yeats’s 1903 volume, In the Seven Woods. The website is intended mainly for students and casual readers, with an emphasis on fortifying understanding of the context and critical interpretations surrounding each poem. Located on most of the poem pages are links to a detailed notes page, which provides historical information and detailed background for the texts.

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Yeats’s In the Seven Woods is the premiere volume in Yeats’s middle period, and represents a shift from the theosophical fixation of his early works toward more tangible subjects. In much of In the Seven Woods, Yeats quibbles with love and beauty in a way he had not done previously. This, and much of the imagery in the poetry, informed our decision to divide the poems into a seasonal cycle. Each poem was categorized into one of the four seasons, as informed by their subject matter and descriptive qualities. We found that this categorization of the poems helped us feel more connected to nature and to the organic subject matter that runs throughout this volume.

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As we designed this website with the four seasons in mind, we were able to better imagine the setting in which Yeats wrote these poems. This came to serve as our own pathway into a more organic reading of In The Seven Woods. The aim of this website is to give each reader of Yeats a new path to take through this volume of poetry; a reader who is looking for a scholarly lens might travel through the "Notes on the Poems," while another reader may find a better connection to the poems through the aesthetic trail map on our home page. Despite its digital format, this website is a guide toward experiencing In The Seven Woods closer to how Yeats might have intended it.

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Many people encounter this volume through an anthology of Yeats poetry. However, these anthologies often neglect to share the background behind Yeats's penning of In The Seven Woods. Such a reader might never know the behind-the-scenes collaborations that occurred, nor the geographical location that influenced Yeats. Our website strives to reveal more of the original intent behind In The Seven Woods than a hard-copy anthology would be able to. By exposing the parts of this volume, we are making Yeats—the poet and the person—more accessible to everyone.

   

In digitizing Yeats’s work, we desired to both increase accessibility to the poems and give readers insight they simply cannot receive from the printed page. As literary analyst Roberto Simanowski wrote, “New media technologies are thought to remedy deficiencies of prior technologies. One thinks of photography, which remedies the insufficiency of representing reality in painting, while film remedies the incapacity of photography to represent reality in time.” Just as Yeats was often known to retrospectively revise his own works to "express better what [he] thought and felt when [he] was [younger]," so too did we set out on a similar paradoxical pursuit: to rediscover the original intentions behind the work by organizing that work anew. Thus, we bring to you this new collection of Yeats’s In the Seven Woods on a digital platform that offers readers instant annotations and an engaging, immersive aesthetic experience which traditional formats lack.

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Works Cited:

Simanowski, Roberto. “Digital Anthropophagy: Refashioning Words as Image, Sound and
Action.” Leonardo, vol. 43, no. 2, 2010, pp. 159.

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Kangaskoski, Matti, et al. “New Reading Strategies in Print and on Digital Platforms: Stephanie
Strickland’s V.” Reading Today, UCL Press, London, 2018, pp. 87–102.

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The Wood Elves of SUNY Geneseo hope your understanding and love for Yeats is bolstered by our website. Thank you for exploring The Seven Woods with us!