A. Norman Jeffares (ed.):Yeats, Sligo and Ireland

Abstract

For assembling and publishing the essays in Yeats, Sligo and Ireland, Norman Jeffares has earned our gratitude, not only because the Yeats Summer School deserves a fitting scholarly memorial but also because he has included some of the most distinguished critics now writing about Yeats. Nevertheless, it will be disappointing to many of those who have talked over the years about a somewhat different book: a selected collection of representative essays delivered at Sligo. Not only would the editor have had a much greater number of writers and essays to choose from but also he would have been able to illustrate the changing and developing climate of Yeats scholarship since the centennial through the work of many of his most distinguished critics: the list of “Speakers at Sligo 1960–1980” (pp. 258–60) reads like a Who’s Who of Yeats scholars for the past quarter century. Some advantages of such a collection are clear: the inclusion of many distinguished people not available, I presume, to Jeffares; a great number of essays (more than 200) to choose from; and the opportunity to order the essays around a thesis. Equally clear, of course, is one serious disadvantage: many of the papers delivered at Sligo — and those often the best, no doubt — have been published.