Volume 32, Number 1 · January 31, 1985
The Magician
By Daniel Albright
W.B. Yeats: The Poems
a new edition edited by Richard J. Finneran
Macmillan, 747 pp., $19.95
Editing Yeats's Poems
by Richard J. Finneran
St. Martin's, 144 pp., $20.00
A New Commentary on the Poems of W.B. Yeats
by A. Norman Jeffares
Stanford University Press, 543 pp., $39.50
In Yeats's best-known play, Purgatory (1938), the protagonist is an old man who is at once the murderer of his father and of his son. Yeats's relation to the poets who were his predecessors and his followers is similar. One finds in his essays and memoirs several references to the poets of 'my school,' but by the 1930s Yeats's school had, apart from his paramours, only one student, who was also the only teacher. The chief poets of the 1880s and 1890s, Rossetti, Morris, Dowson, Lionel Johnson, seem in comparison to Yeats a group of freaks, fizzles, and enthusiasts, while the great modernists seem to establish their university upon a curriculum wholly different from that of Yeats's school.
Review, 5226 words
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