Glimpses of W. B. Yeats

Abstract

During the early thirties, when I was earning my livelihood in London as a reviewer, I was asked by a publisher to write a biographical study of Yeats. Despite the reputation of the poet as a Nobel Prize-winner, only three studies of his work had appeared, the first, a short one, by an American writer,¹ the other two by Irishmen, J. M. Hone,² and the novelist, Forrest Reid.³ The alert young director who interviewed me in the great office of the firm asked me whether the love affair between Maud Gonne and Yeats had been platonic or not, as this would give interest to the book. I said that I would question the poet himself and the director looked at me with such surprise that I realised at once the rashness of my promise. When I got back to Bricket Wood, a wooded corner of Herts near St. Albans, where I lived, I took down from the shelf The Wind among the Reeds and read it carefully in order to see if I could find out the truth from the poems themselves. These lyrics have the languorous, sensuous quality which the poets of the Nineties borrowed from Rossetti and his school. Certainly in some of them there were indications that the poet’s relations with Maud Gonne had been immoral! He speaks of—

Passion-dimmed eyes and long heavy hair

That was shaken out over my breast.⁴

Extracted from Shenandoah (Lexington, Virginia) xvi, no. 4 (Summer 1965) 25–36.