W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies Scribner 539 pages More than 100 years ago the Irish writer W. B. Yeats, then at the beginning of his literary career, had to justify to himself the value of literature. Poetry, he wrote, "will not help you to make a fortune, or even live respectably that little life of yours. Great poetry does not teach us anything--it changes us." It appeals to "the whole nature of man" and thus helps create what Yeats was later to call "Unity of Being," the full realization of our entire self, body and soul, thought and feeling, inextricably fused.     Because poetry was "no rootless flower" but grew in the mind of man, it required a special integrity on the poet's part: "a poet's life is an experiment in living, and those that come after have a right to know it." And certainly Yeats's own life was by any standard a fascinating one: son of a great painter, brother to another, and father of a third; Irish nationalist involved with the secret revolutionary organization that became the IRA; lifelong student of the occult; frustrated lover of "the most beautiful woman in the world"; successful lover of many other women; co-founder of the Irish theater movement; member of the Senate of the Irish Free State; winner of the Nobel Prize; "wild, wicked old man."     Yeats himself responded to the imperative of recording at least portions of his own experiment in living by publishing a number of autobiographical volumes, including Reveries over Childhood and Youth, The Trembling of the Veil and Dramatis Personae. Until recently, however, they have been available only in editions of questionable textual authority and with little or no apparatus to help the reader. William H. O'Donnell and Douglas N. Archibald's Autobiographies at last provides an authoritative edition. The editorial team is an ideal one. O'Donnell, professor of English at the University of Memphis, may be the best of all Yeatsian textual scholars, while Archibald, one of our wisest interpreters of the poet's life and work, has published book-length studies of both WBY and his improvident but wonderful painter father, John Butler Yeats. The result of their combined efforts is a volume of impeccable scholarship that will prove invaluable to specialist and general reader alike. The introduction traces the history of the various memoirs that eventually coalesced into Autobiographies, and 130 pages of annotations illuminate the text. Regrettably, the format of the series in which this volume is published prohibits the inclusion of extended critical analysis, depriving Professor Archibald of the opportunity for further brilliant meditations on this complex figure and his world.     With all the resources provided, however, we can read Yeats's text with pleasure. Moreover, we can see that the act of writing these memoirs was itself an effort on Yeats's part towards his own attainment of Unity of Being. As the editors point out, we are witnesses "to the process by which accident and incoherence become complete, by which life, passing through phantasmagoria, becomes meaning, and experience becomes myth. It is that great Romantic achievement: a vision of personal history as art.... It shows Yeats at work--summoning his people, realizing his places, making a world--and so continues to dramatize and fulfill his belief that the act of writing entails a complex creation of a self."     In one of his last letters, Yeats told a friend that "man can embody truth but he cannot know it. I must embody it in the conclusion of my life." The manuscripts of his last poem, "The Black Tower," show him struggling while literally on his deathbed to decide whether a line of the poem should read "that banner" or "those banners." W. H. Auden was right in asserting, in his ambivalent elegy "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," that "The words of a dead man/Are modified in the guts of the living," but also that they might "still persuade us to rejoice." Reading Autobiographies today allows us to do so once again. Phillip L. Marcus is professor of English and director of the M.A. in literature program at Florida International University.