Jacqueline Genet (ed.), Studies on W. B. Yeats (Caen: Groupe de Recherche d’Etudes Anglo-irlandaises du Centre Nationale de Recherche Sociale, 1990) 284 pp.

Abstract

This modest, carelessly printed and therefore ephemeral book of eleven essays commemorates the international Yeats conference held at the University of Caen on 10 and 11 November 1989. Produced with excessive speed in about four months, this volume seems aimed at those French postgraduate students who, once primed by several excellent performances, must be eager for transcripts of what they heard, in various states of finish. What are the rest of us to make of it? Beautifully apparelled in ebony cover and sporting, sedately, an image of permanence (Yeats’s piece of lapis lazuli transcended from the editor’s laboured explication de texte on pp. 257–82), the collection overall struggles to rise above its faults and wholly succeeds in doing so in perhaps no more than three or four cases.