A. Norman Jeffares, W. B. Yeats: A New Biography(London: Hutchinson, 1988) ix + 374 pp

Abstract

The frontispiece of this biography reproduces Granville Fell’s cover design for the 1895 Poems: against a background of Rosicrucian roses, a young St Michael in full medieval dress, girt with his sword, is being crowned by two female angels, each holding one of the youth’s hands, while before this central group kneel two more angels, proffering a chalice of wine and a morsel of consecrated bread (if I am not mistaken in my interpretation of these objects). All five characters wear haloes, but St Michael is allotted the most radiant one, and downcast eyes mark his modesty. Although Yeats came to hate this “expressionless angel” (Wade p. 37), this Pre-Raphaelite medievalising is distinctly pre-modern, and it makes nakedly visible the increasing remoteness of our great modernist. With Yeats’s death fifty years behind us, we no longer find Yeats quite so much our contemporary as we did, say, in 1948, when A. Norman Jeffares first wrote about him. This new biography is the first since Hone’s to set fully before us, in brisk factuality, the events and personal relations of Yeats’s life, and will be as welcome to the general reader as to the teacher and student of Yeats.