the first edition of w b yeatss the tower appeared in bookstores in london on valentines day 1928 his english publisher printed just 2000 copies of this slender volume of twentyone poems priced at six shillings the book was immediately embraced by book buyers and critics alike and it quickly became a bestseller subsequent versions of the volume made various changes throughout but this scribner facsimile edition reproduces exactly that seminal first edition as it reached its earliest audience in 1928 adding an introduction and notes by esteemed yeats scholar richard j finneran written between 1912 and 1927 these poems sailing to byzantium leda and the swan and among school children among them are today considered some of the best and most famous in the entire yeats canon as virginia woolf declared in her unsigned review of this collection mr yeats has never written more exactly and more passionately