Yeats Letters Found!

The Guardian's Dalya Alberge reports on a trove of letters written by William Butler Yeats long missing, now recovered at the Princeton University Library. "A collection of unpublished letters written by WB Yeats that was stolen in the 1970s and returned 'anonymously' has been identified," Alberge explains. From there: 

John Kelly, who has spent decades tracking down thousands of Yeats’s letters, discovered the collection as he was concluding research for the latest volume of his work on the Irish poet and dramatist.

Kelly was browsing the catalogue of Princeton University Library, where he had pored over Yeats’s holdings some years earlier, when he spotted a file of 17 letters to the poet’s publisher he had not seen before. 

He discovered from the librarian it had been stolen in the 1970s, disappearing without trace until it turned up recently, delivered anonymously in a brown package.

Libraries often list donors of books or manuscripts. The Princeton file said: “A gift of anonymous, return of a 1970s theft.”

Kelly, the general editor of the Collected Letters of WB Yeats, recalled feeling disconcerted that he could have missed an entire collection of significant letters. “Upon inquiry, it turned out that the letters, then in a binder, had been stolen … and only recently and anonymously returned,” he said.

Learn more at The Guardian.