W.B. Yeats : A New Biography

Hutchinson, London, first edition, 1988. Cloth, 8vo, 24 cm,. x, [i], 374 pp, ills. From the blurb - "Forty years ago A. Norman Jeffares produced a biography of W. B. Yeats which was taken as definitive. However, that book appeared just ten years after Yeats's death, and since that time much new material has come to light, both written and illustrative, so that in the fiftieth year since the great poet's death a major reassessment is called for. Professor Jeffares has drawn upon material in the Yeats collection now in the possession of the poet's son and daughter, Michael and Anne Yeats, in the Jeanne R. Foster - William M. Murphy Collection in Schenectady, New York, in the National Library of Ireland, the Library of Trinity College, Dublin, the Brotherton Library in the University of Leeds, the University of Manchester, the University of Reading, and the Lawrence Collection in the National Library of Ireland. He has had access to unpublished correspondence, and has based some of his comments on conversations with friends and relatives of Yeats. The result is an incisive but always sympathetic biography that does full justice to Yeats as poet, dramatist, critic, occult philosopher and autobiographer, but above all triumphantly portrays Yeats as a person, from his early days as unhappy schoolboy to the burgeoning artist, the founder of the Irish Literary Theatre, the Senator and world-renowned literary figure. Unlike many recent studies, this biography does not attempt a full evaluation of the poetry, although Yeats's verse, diaries, letters and manuscripts are frequently quoted where they help to illuminate the life. Non-authorial gift inscription on title-page, top edge slightly dust-stained, otherwise near Very Good in slightly chipped dustwrapper.