Most of the poems collected in The Wild Swans at Coole were written between 1915 and 1918, a critical period in Yeats's adult life. First published in 1917 in a volume including twenty-three poems and a play, The Wild Swans at Coole was reissued in 1919 without the play and with seventeen additional poems. The Cornell Yeats edition includes transcriptions of manuscript materials for the poems in both collections, accompanied by a generous number of facsimiles. The years during which Yeats composed The Wild Swans at Coole witnessed the painful drama of his successive proposals of marriage, first to Maud Gonne and then to her daughter Iseult. Rejected by both, he abruptly married Georgie Hyde-Lees. Yeats's new wife developed the practice of "automatic writing," thereby introducing him to a liberating world of mystical communication which he would further explore in A Vision.