The Living Stream E-Book

Warwick Gould

• Herausgeber: Open Book Publishers
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Yeats Annual No. 18 is another special issue in this renowned research-level series offering a tribute to the pioneering Yeats scholar, A. Norman Jeffares.Memories of the man are shared by Seamus Heaney, Christopher Rush and Colin Smythe, who compiles a bibliography of Jeffares’s work. Terence Brown, Neil Corcoran, Warwick Gould, Joseph M. Hassett, Phillip L. Marcus, Ann Saddlemyer, Ronald Schuchard, Deirdre Toomey and Helen Vendler offer essays on such topics as Yeats and the Colours of Poetry, Yeats’s Shakespeare, Yeats and Seamus Heaney, Lacrimae Rerum and Tragic Joy, Raftery’s work on Yeats’s Thoor Ballylee, Edmund Dulac’s portrait of Mrs George Yeats, The Tower as an anti-Modernist monument, with close studies of ‘Vacillation’, ‘Her Triumph’, and ‘The Cold Heaven’.Throughout, the essays are inflected with memories of Jeffares and his critical methods. The volume is rounded with further essays on A Vision by Neil Mann and Matthew de Forrest, while reviews of recent editions and studies are provided by Matthew Campbell, Wayne K. Chapman, Sandra Clark, Denis Donoghue, Nicholas Grene, Joseph M. Hassett, and K.P.S. Jochum.Yeats Annual is published by Open Book Publishers in association with the Institute of English Studies, University of London.

Leseprobe

In the same series

YEATS ANNUALS Nos. 1, 2 Edited by Richard J. Finneran

YEATS ANNUALS Nos. 3-8, 10-11, 13 Edited by Warwick Gould

YEATS AND WOMEN: YEATS ANNUAL No. 9: A Special Number Edited by Deirdre Toomey

THAT ACCUSING EYE: YEATS AND HIS IRISH READERS YEATS ANNUAL No. 12: A Special Number Edited by Warwick Gould and Edna Longley

YEATS AND THE NINETIES YEATS ANNUAL No. 14: A Special Number Edited by Warwick Gould

YEATS’S COLLABORATIONS YEATS ANNUAL No. 15: A Special Number Edited by Wayne K. Chapman and Warwick Gould

POEMS AND CONTEXTS YEATS ANNUAL No. 16: A Special Number Edited by Warwick Gould

INFLUENCE AND CONFLUENCE: YEATS ANNUAL No. 17: A Special Number

YEATS ANNUAL No. 18

Frontispiece: Derry Jeffares beside the Edmund Dulac memorial stone to W. B. Yeats. Roquebrune Cemetery, France, 1986. Private Collection.

THE LIVING STREAM

ESSAYS IN MEMORY OF A. NORMAN JEFFARES

YEATS ANNUAL No. 18A Special Issue

Edited by Warwick Gould

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© 2013 Gould, et al. (contributors retain copyright of their work).

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ISBN Hardback: 978-1-909254-36-7

ISBN Paperback: 978-1-909254-35-0

ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-909254-37-4

ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-909254-38-1

ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978-1-909254-39-8

Series ISSN: 0278-7687

DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0028

Cover image: Thomas Sturge Moore’s cover for The Tower (1928), Private Collection, London. The Yeats Annual fleuron (cover and half-title) is based upon Thomas Sturge Moore’s rose design, as used in his illustrations for H. P. R. Finberg’s translation of Count de Villiers de L’Isle Adam’s Axel with Yeats’s preface (London: Jarrolds Publishers Ltd., 1925), and elsewhere on cover designs for Yeats’s books, most notably Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1917), courtesy of the late Riette Sturge Moore.

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Printed in the United Kingdom and United States by Lightning Source for Open Book Publishers

IN MEMORIAM

A. Norman Jeffares

11 August 1920-1 June 2005

Contents

List of Illustrations

Abbreviations

Editorial Board

Notes on the Contributors

Editor’s Introduction

Acknowledgements and Editorial Information

ESSAYS IN MEMORY OF A NORMAN JEFFARES

Professor Alexander Norman Jeffares 11 August 1920-1 June 2005

CHRISTOPHER RUSH

From the Window of the House

SEAMUS HEANEY

Lips and Ships, Peers and Tears: Lacrimae Rerum and Tragic Joy:

WARWICK GOULD

Yeats and the Colours of Poetry

TERENCE BROWN

Yeats’s Shakespeare: ‘There is a Good Deal of my Father in it’

DENIS DONOGHUE

What Raftery Built

JOSEPH M. HASSETT

A Portrait of George Yeats

ANN SADDLEMYER

The Tower: Yeats’s Anti-Modernist Monument

RONALD SCHUCHARD

Vacillation: Between What and What?

HELEN VENDLER

W. B. Yeats and the Creative Process: The Example of ‘Her Triumph’

PHILLIP L. MARCUS

The Cold Heaven

DEIRDRE TOOMEY

Question Me Again: Reflections of W. B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney

NEIL CORCORAN

A Select Checklist of the Writings of Alexander Norman Jeffares (1920-2005)

COLIN SMYTHE

‘MASTERING WHAT IS MOST ABSTRACT’: A FORUM ON A VISION

A Vision (1925): A Review Essay

NEIL MANN

Yeats and the New Physics

MATTHEW M. DeFORREST

REVIEWS

‘A Law Indifferent to Blame or Praise’: W. B. Yeats, The Tower (1928): Manuscript Materials, edited by Richard J. Finneran, with Jared Curtis and Ann Saddlemyer

WAYNE K. CHAPMAN

Denis Donoghue, On Eloquence

SANDRA CLARK

Nicholas Grene, Yeats’s Poetic Codes

JOSEPH M. HASSETT

W. B. Yeats, The King of the Great Clock Tower and A Full Moon in March: Manuscript Materials, edited by Richard Allen Cave

NICHOLAS GRENE

Helen Vendler, Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form

DENIS DONOGHUE

Ronald Schuchard, The Last Minstrels: Yeats and the Revival of the Bardic Arts

MATTHEW CAMPBELL

Fiorenzo Fantaccini, W. B. Yeats e la cultura italiana

K. P. S. JOCHUM

Margaret Mills Harper, Wisdom of Two: The Spiritual and Literary Collaboration of George and W. B. Yeats

DENIS DONOGHUE

PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED

List of Illustrations

Cover Image: Thomas Sturge Moore’s cover for The Tower (1928), Private Collection, London. The Yeats Annual fleuron (cover and half-title) is based upon Thomas Sturge Moore’s rose design, as used in his illustrations for H. P. R. Finberg’s translation of Count de Villiers de L’Isle Adam’s Axel with Yeats’s preface (London: Jarrolds Publishers Ltd., 1925), and elsewhere on cover designs for Yeats’s books, most notably that for Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1917), courtesy of the late Riette Sturge Moore.

Frontispiece: Derry Jeffares beside the Edmund Dulac memorial stone to W. B. Yeats, Roquebrune Cemetery, France, 1986. Private Collection.

Plates

1.Between pp. 25-26, Yeats’s holograph revision to ‘The Sorrow of Love’ tipped in to Lady Gregory’s copy of Poems (1895) and misdated, probably by her, in the Robert W. Woodruff Collection, Emory University, Atlanta, GA.

2.Between pp. 25-26, Yeats’s holograph revision in another of Lady Gregory’s copies of Poems, that of 1904, also now in the Woodruff Collection at Emory and altered in 1924 as marked in pencil. This slip is pasted onto a torn-off printed slip bearing a part of line 10, almost certainly from an uncorrected proof of Early Poems and Stories (1925).

3.Between pp. 25-26, top board of Lady Gregory’s white and gold copy of Poems (1904) now in the Robert W. Woodruff Collection, Emory.

4.Between pp. 25-26, close-up of the tipped-in revisions in Plates 1 and 2.

5.Facing p. 40, W. B. Y. listening to Homer’, undated (c. 1887), by Jack B. Yeats, pasted into a copy of The Wind Among the Reeds (1900), in the Woodruff Collection, Emory.

6.Facing p. 45, Yeats’s holograph revisions in the setting copy of ‘The Adoration of the Magi’ for Early Poems and Stories (1925). Berg Collection, New York Public Library.

7.Facing p. 105, Thoor Ballylee, cottage in ruin, river and bridge, a pen and ink drawing by A. Norman Jeffares, 17 x 22.5 cm, private collection. This drawing was the basis of a chapter tailpiece vignette in W. B. Yeats: Man and Poet (London: Routledge, 1949).

8.Facing p. 108, ‘Mrs W. B. Yeats’, by Edmund Dulac, exhibited at the Leicester Galleries, London, June 1920, in the possession of the Yeats family, photograph by Nicola Gordon Bowe. All Dulac images © Marcia Geraldine Anderson, courtesy Hodder and Stoughton Ltd.

9.Between pp. 108-09, Robert Gregory’s design of the ‘Charging Unicorn’ first used on the title-page of Discoveries (1907). Private Collection.

10.Between pp. 108-09, Gustave Moreau, ‘Les Licornes’ (c. 1885), an unfinished oil on canvas in the Musée Gustave Moreau, Paris, and based on the 15th century tapestries then recently acquired by the Musée de Cluny, Paris (see Plate 12). Photographer unknown.

11.Between pp. 108-09, ‘Monoceros de Astris’ by Thomas Sturge Moore, title-page of Reveries Over Childhood and Youth (1915). Private Collection.

12.Between pp. 108-09, Bookplate for George Yeats by Thomas Sturge Moore, showing a round tower struck by lightning, releasing a white unicorn, Senate House Library, University of London.

13.Between pp. 110-11, Red tapestry, ‘La dame à la licorne’, 15th century, Musée de Cluny, Paris. Photographer unknown, Public Domain.

14.Between pp. 110-11, ‘Deer and Unicorn’ wood-cut from The Book of Lambspring, as reproduced in A. E. Waite’s The Hermetic Museum, Restored and Enlarged (London, James Elliott & Co., 1893).

15.Facing p. 117, Edmund Dulac’s pastel caricature of Yeats, 1915, Abbey Theatre, Dublin, photographer unknown.

16.Facing p. 130, Edmund Dulac’s ‘The Good Chiron Taught His Pupils How to Play upon the Harp’ in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tanglewood Tales (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1918). Private Collection.

17.Between pp. 139-40, Edmund Dulac’s woodcut of a unicorn in A Vision (1925). Private Collection, London. It also appeared on the title-page of Stories of Michael Robartes and his Friends (1932), and in Last Poems and Two Plays (1939). Copies in Private Collection.

18.Between pp. 139-40, Charles Ricketts’s endpapers for the 1920s Macmillan Collected Edition of the Works of W. B. Yeats. Private Collection.

19.Between pp. 139-40, Thomas Sturge Moore’s ‘Candle in Waves’ sigil on the title-page of Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1920). This emblem of ‘the soul in the midst of the waters of the flesh or of time’ also appeared in Seven Poems and a Fragment (1922) and October Blast (1927). Private Collection.

20.Between pp. 139-40, Yeats’s bookplate, by Thomas Sturge Moore, showing the candle in waves motif above Sturge Moore’s gates, his visual pun on the origins of Yeats’s name in the Middle English and northern and north-midland dialectal word ‘yeat’ or ‘yate’ meaning ‘gate’, Senate House Library, University of London.

21.Facing p. 197, the biggest rookery in Europe at Buckenham Carr Woods, near Norwich, courtesy Jane Rusbridge, ©Natalie Miller.

22-24. Facing p. 242, three faces of Derry Jeffares, Unknown contemporary press photographers. Images courtesy of Colin Smythe Ltd. All rights reserved.

Abbreviations

Au

Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1955).

AVA

A Vision: An Explanation of Life Founded upon the Writings of Giraldus and upon certain Doctrines attributed to Kusta Ben Luka (London: privately printed for subscribers only by T. Werner Laurie, Ltd., 1925). See also CVA.

AVB

A Vision (London: Macmillan, 1962).

Berg

Books and Manuscripts, The Berg Collection, New York Public Library (Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations).

BIV1, 2

A Book of Irish Verse (London: Methuen, 1895; 1900).

BL Add. MS

Additional Manuscript, The British Library, London (followed by number).

BL Macmillan

Later papers from the Macmillan Archive, British Library, London.

Bodley

Bodleian Library, Oxford.

Bradford

Curtis B. Bradford, Yeats at Work (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965).

Brotherton

Manuscript, The Brotherton Collection, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds.

CH

W. B. Yeats: The Critical Heritage, ed. A. Norman Jeffares (London: Henley; Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977).

CL1, 2, 3, 4

The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats: Volume I, 1865-1895, ed. John Kelly and Eric Domville; Volume II, 1896-1900, ed. Warwick Gould, John Kelly and Deirdre Toomey; Volume III, 1901-1904, and Volume IV, 1905-1907, eds. John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986, 1997, 1994, 2005).

CL InteLex

The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, gen. ed. John Kelly (Oxford: Oxford University Press (InteLex Electronic Edition)) 2002. Letters cited by Accession number.

CM

W. B. Yeats: A Census of the Manuscripts, by Conrad A. Balliet, with the assistance of Christine Mawhinney (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1990).

CVA

A Critical Edition of Yeats’s A Vision (1925), ed. by George Mills Harper and Walter Kelly Hood (London: Macmillan, 1978).

CW1

The Poems: Second Edition (New York: Scribner, 1997), ed. by Richard J. Finneran and replacing The Poems: Revised (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1989; London: Macmillan, 1989), PR, which replaced The Poems: A New Edition (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1983; London: Macmillan London Ltd., 1984), PNE, as the first volume of The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats (formerly The Collected Edition of the Works of W. B. Yeats). CW2 The Plays, eds. David R. Clark and Rosalind E. Clark (New York: Scribner, 2001), vol. II of The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats.

CW3

Autobiographies, eds. William H. O’Donnell and Douglas N. Archibald, assisted by J. Fraser Cocks III and Gretchen Schwenker (New York: Scribner, 1999), vol. III of The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats.

CW5

Later Essays, ed. William H. O’Donnell, with assistance from Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994), vol. V of The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats.

CW6

Prefaces and Introductions: Uncollected Prefaces and Introductions by Yeats to Works by other Authors and to Anthologies edited by Yeats, ed. William H. O’Donnell (London: Macmillan, 1988), vol. VI of The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats.

CW7

Letters to the New Island eds. George Bornstein and Hugh Witemeyer (London: Macmillan, 1989), vol. VII of The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats.

CW8

The Irish Dramatic Movement, eds. Mary FitzGerald and Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 2003), vol. VIII of The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats.

CW9

Early Articles and Reviewss: Uncollected Articles and Reviews Written between 1886 and 1900, eds. John P. Frayne and Madeleine Marchaterre (New York: Scribner, 2004), vol. IX of The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats.

CW10

Later Articles and Reviews: Uncollected Articles, Reviews, and Radio Broadcasts written after 1900, ed. Colton Johnson (New York: Scribner, 2000), vol. X of The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats.

CW12

John Sherman AND Dhoya, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1991), vol. XII of The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats.

CW13

A Vision: The Original 1925 Version, ed. Catherine E. Paul and Margaret Mills Harper (New York: Scribner 2008), vol. XIII of The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats.

CWVP1-8

The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats (Stratford-on-Avon: The Shakespeare Head Press, 1908, 8 vols.).

DC

Druid Craft: The Writing of The Shadowy Waters, Manuscripts of W. B. Yeats, transcribed, edited and with a commentary by Michael J. Sidnell, George P. Mayhew and David R. Clark (Amherst, MA: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1971).

Diaries

Lady Gregory’s Diaries 1892-1902, ed. James Pethica (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1996).

E&I

Essays and Introductions (London and New York: Macmillan, 1961).

Emory

Books and Manuscripts in the Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University, Atlanta.

Ex

Explorations, sel. Mrs W. B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1962; New York: Macmillan, 1963).

FFTIP

Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry. Edited and selected by W. B. Yeats (London: Walter Scott, Ltd., 1888).

G-YL

The Gonne-Yeats Letters 1893-1938: Always Your Friend, ed. Anna MacBride White and A. Norman Jeffares (London: Hutchinson, 1992).

Harvard

Manuscript, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

HRHRC

Books and Manuscripts, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.

I&R

W. B. Yeats: Interviews and Recollections, ed. E. H. Mikhail (London: Macmillan, 1977), 2 vols.

IFT

Irish Fairy Tales edited with an introduction by W. B. Yeats (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1892).

J

W. B. Yeats: A Classified Bibliography of Criticism, second edition, revised and enlarged, by K. P. S. Jochum (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1990). Item nos. or page no. preceded by ‘p.’.

JBYL

Letters to his Son W. B. Yeats and Others 1869-1922, by J. B. Yeats, edited with a Memoir by Joseph Hone and a Preface by Oliver Elton (London: Faber and Faber, 1944).

Kansas

Manuscripts in the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas, Lawrence.

L

The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954; New York: Macmillan, 1955).

LBP

Letters from Bedford Park: A Selection from the Correspondence (1890-1901) of John Butler Yeats, ed. with an introduction and notes by William M. Murphy (Dublin: The Cuala Press, 1972).

LDW

Letters on Poetry from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley, introduction by Kathleen Raine (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1964).

Life 1

W. B. Yeats: A Life, I: The Apprentice Mage, by R. F. Foster (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

Life 2

W. B. Yeats: A Life, II: The Arch-Poet, by R. F. Foster (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

Lilly

Manuscript in the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington.

LJQ

The Letters of John Quinn to W. B. Yeats, ed. Alan B. Himber, with the assistance of George Mills Harper (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983).

LMR

‘Ah, Sweet Dancer’: W. B. Yeats, Margot Ruddock, A Correspondence, ed. Roger McHugh (London and New York: Macmillan, 1970).

LNI

Letters to the New Island: A New Edition (CEW 7), ed. George Bornstein and Hugh Whitemeyer (London: Macmillan, 1989).

LRB

The Correspondence of Robert Bridges and W. B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran (London: Macmillan, 1977; Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1978).

LTWBY1, 2

Letters to W. B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran, George Mills Harper and William M. Murphy, with the assistance of Alan B. Himber (London: Macmillan; New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 2 vols.

MBY

Manuscript in the Collection of Michael Butler Yeats.

McGarry

James P. McGarry, Places Names in the Writings of W. B. Yeats, edited with additional material by Edward Malins and a Preface by Kathleen Raine (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe Ltd., 1976).

Mem

Memoirs: Autobiography-First Draft: Journal, transcribed and edited by Denis Donoghue (London: Macmillan, 1972; New York: Macmillan, 1973).

Myth

Mythologies (London and New York: Macmillan, 1959).

Myth 2005

Mythologies, ed. by Warwick Gould and Deirdre Toomey (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

MYV1, 2

The Making of Yeats’s ‘A Vision’: A Study of the Automatic Script, by George Mills Harper (London: Macmillan; Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), 2 vols.

NLI

Manuscripts in the National Library of Ireland, Dublin.

NLS

Manuscripts in the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh.

NYPL

Manuscripts in the New York Public Library.

Norwood

Manuscripts, Norwood Historical Society, Day House, Norwood, MA.

OBMV

The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1895-1935, chosen by W. B. Yeats (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936).

Princeton

Manuscript in the Scribner Archive, Firestone Library, Princeton University.

Quinn Cat.

Complete Catalogue of the Library of John Quinn sold by auction in five parts [with printed prices] (New York: The Anderson Galleries, 1924), 2 vols.

SB

The Speckled Bird by William Butler Yeats: an Autobiographical Novel With Variant Versions: New Edition, incorporating recently discovered manuscripts, edited and annotated by William H. O’Donnell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

SQ

A Servant of the Queen: Reminiscences, by Maud Gonne MacBride, eds. A. Norman Jeffares and Anna MacBride White (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1994).

SS

The Senate Speeches of W. B. Yeats, ed. Donald R. Pearce (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1960; London: Faber and Faber, 1961).

TB

Theatre Business: The Correspondence of the First Abbey Theatre Directors: William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory and J. M. Synge, ed. Ann Saddlemyer (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe; University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1982).

TSMC

W. B. Yeats and T. Sturge Moore: Their Correspondence, 1901-1937, ed. Ursula Bridge (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; New York: Oxford University Press, 1953).

UP1

Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats, Vol. I, ed. John P. Frayne (London: Macmillan; New York: Columbia University Press, 1970).

UP2

Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats, Vol. 2, ed. John P. Frayne and Colton Johnson (London: Macmillan, 1975; New York: Columbia University Press, 1976).

VBWI

Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland collected and arranged by Lady Gregory: With two Essays and Notes by W. B. Yeats with a foreword by Elizabeth Coxhead (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe Ltd.; New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).

VP

The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1957). Cited from the corrected third printing of 1966.

VPl

The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W. B. Yeats, ed. Russell K. Alspach, assisted by Catherine C. Alspach (London and New York: Macmillan, 1966). Cited from the corrected second printing of 1966.

VSR

The Secret Rose, Stories by W. B. Yeats: A Variorum Edition, ed. Warwick Gould, Phillip L. Marcus and Michael J. Sidnell (London: Macmillan, 1992). Second ed., revised and enlarged.

Wade

Allan Wade, A Bibliography of the Writings of W. B. Yeats, third ed., revised by Russell K. Alspach (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1968). Item nos. and/or page nos. preceded by ‘p.’.

WWB1, 2, 3

The Works of William Blake Poetic, Symbolic, and Critical, edited with lithographs of the illustrated ‘Prophetic Books’, and a memoir and interpretation by Edwin John Ellis and William Butler Yeats, 3 vols. (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1893).

YA

Yeats Annual (London: Macmillan, 1982-) cited by no.

YAACTS

Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies, ed. Richard J. Finneran (publishers vary, 1983-99) cited by no.

YGYL

W. B. Yeats and George Yeats: The Letters, ed. Ann Saddlemyer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

YL

Edward O’Shea, A Descriptive Catalog of W. B. Yeats’s Library (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1985).

YO

Yeats and the Occult, ed. George Mills Harper (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada; Niagara Falls, New York: Maclean-Hunter Press, 1975).

YP

Yeats’s Poems, ed. and annotated by A. Norman Jeffares, with an appendix by Warwick Gould (London: Macmillan, 1989). Cited from the second, revised edition of 1991.

YT

Yeats and the Theatre, ed. Robert O’Driscoll and Lorna Reynolds (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada; Niagara Falls, New York: Maclean-Hunter Press, 1975).

YVP1, 2, 3, 4

Yeats’s Vision Papers (London: Macmillan, 1992; Palgrave 2001), George Mills Harper (general editor) assisted by Mary Jane Harper, vol. I: The Automatic Script: 5 November 1917-18 June 1918, eds. Steve L. Adams, Barbara J. Frieling and Sandra L. Sprayberry; vol. II: The Automatic Script: 25 June 1918-29 March 1920, eds. Steve L. Adams, Barbara J. Frieling and Sandra L. Sprayberry; vol. III: Sleep and Dream Notebooks, Vision Notebooks 1 and 2, Card File, eds. Robert Anthony Martinich and Margaret Mills Harper; vol. IV: ‘The Discoveries of Michael Robartes’ Version B [‘The Great Wheel’ and ‘The Twenty-Eight Embodiments’], eds. George Mills Harper and Margaret Mills Harper assisted by Richard W. Stoops, Jr.

Editorial Board

Seamus Deane

Denis Donoghue

Jacqueline Genet

Margaret Mills Harper

John Harwood

K. P. S. Jochum

John S. Kelly

Edna Longley

Phillip L. Marcus

William H. O’Donnell

Yukio Oura

Marjorie Perloff

James L. Pethica

Ronald Schuchard

Michael J. Sidnell

Colin Smythe

C. K. Stead

Katharine Worth

Series Editor: Warwick Gould

Research Editor: Deirdre Toomey

Notes on the Contributors

Terence Brown is Professor Emeritus of Anglo-Irish Literature at Trinity College Dublin. He has published widely on Irish literary and cultural history: Northern Voices: Poets from Ulster and Louis Mac-Neice: Sceptical Vision (both 1975), Ireland: A Social and Cultural History (3rd ed., 2004) and The Literature of Ireland: Culture and Criticism (2010). His W. B. Yeats: A Critical Life appeared in 1999.

Matthew Campbell is a Professor at the University of York, and author of Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry (1999), and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry (2003). He co-edited Memory and Memorials, 1789-1914 Literary and Cultural Perspectives (2000) and Beyond the Pleasure Dome: Writing and Addiction from the Romantics (1994).

Richard Allen Cave, Emeritus Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has published extensively on aspects of Irish theatre, and edited the manuscripts of The King of the Great Clock Tower and A Full Moon in March (Cornell, 2007) and Collaborations: Ninette de Valois and W. B.Yeats (2008).

Wayne K. Chapman is Professor of English at Clemson University, South Carolina, and author of Yeats and English Renaissance Literature (1991) and The W. B. and George Yeats Library: A Short-title Catalog (2006). He is editor of The South Carolina Review. He edited The Dreaming of the Bones and Calvary (Cornell, 2003) and co-edited the manuscripts of The Countess Cathleen for the same series (1999) and Yeats’s Collaborations: Yeats Annual No. 15 (2002).

Sandra Clark is Professor Emerita of Renaissance Literature in the University of London, and a Senior Research Fellow in its Institute of English Studies. Her books include The Elizabethan Pamphleteers: Popular Moralistic Pamphlets, 1580-1640 (1984), Sexual Themes and Dramatic Representation (1994), Women and Crime in the Street Literature of Early Modern England (2003), and Renaissance Drama (2007). She has edited The Penguin Shakespeare Dictionary (1999). is Series Editor, Arden Shakespeare Dictionaries (2000-) and is currently preparing the third Arden edition of Macbeth (2014).

Neil Corcoran is Emeritus Alfred Professor of English in the University of Liverpool. His publications include English Poetry since 1940 (1993), The Poetry of Seamus Heaney (1986; rev. and enl., 1998), Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return (2004) and Shakespeare and the Modern Poet (2010). He has edited Do You, Mr Jones? Bob Dylan with the Poets and Professors (2002) and The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century English Poetry (2007).

Matthew DeForrest is Associate Professor of English at Johnson C. Smith University, N. C. His Yeats and the Stylistic Arrangements of Experience appeared in 1998.

Denis Donoghue is University Professor and Henry James Professor of English and American Letters at New York University. Among his many books are William Butler Yeats (1971), his edition of W. B. Yeats, Memoirs Autobiography: First Draft (1971), Thieves of Fire: The Promethean Imagination (The T. S. Eliot Lectures at the University of Kent at Canterbury, 1974), Ferocious Alphabets (1981), The Arts without Mystery (The Reith Lectures, BBC, 1982; 1983), We Irish: Essays on Irish Literature and Society (1988), Warrenpoint (1994), Being Modern Together (1991), Walter Pater: Lover of Strange Souls (1995), Adam’s Curse: Reflections on Literature and Religion (2001). His On Eloquence is reviewed in this volume.

Warwick Gould is Professor of English Literature in the University of London and Director of the Institute of English Studies in the School of Advanced Study. He is co-author of Joachim of Fiore and the Myth of the Eternal Evangel in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (2001), and co-editor of The Secret Rose, Stories by W. B. Yeats: A Variorum Edition (1992), The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, Volume II, 1896-1900 (1997), and Mythologies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). He has edited Yeats Annual since 1983.

Nicholas Grene is Professor of English Literature and a Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin. Among his books are Synge: a Critical Study of the Plays (1975), Bernard Shaw: a Critical View (1984), Shakespeare’s Tragic Imagination (1992), The Politics of Irish Drama (1999), Shakespeare’s Serial History Plays (2002), Yeats’s Poetic Codes (2008, reviewed in this volume). He has also edited or co-edited several works including J. M. Synge, The Well of the Saints (1982), Tradition and Influence in Anglo-Irish Poetry (1989), Shaw, Lady Gregory and the Abbey: a Correspondence and a Record (1993), Interpreting Synge: Essays from the Synge Summer School 1991-2000 (2000), J. M. Synge, Travelling Ireland: Essays 1898-1908 (2009), and Synge and Edwardian Ireland (2011). His childhood memoir Nothing Quite Like It was published in 2011.

Joseph M. Hassett is a partner in a Washington law firm and the author of Yeats and the Poetics of Hate (1986) which grew from his UCD doctorate. His recent W. B. Yeats and the Muses (2010) is to be reviewed in the next volume of Yeats Annual.

Seamus Heaney is the most renowned of contemporary Irish poets. He first achieved notice for Door into the Dark (1966), sand the most recent of his many volumes of poems is Human Chain (2010). The winner of many honours for his work, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. He is also a prolific essayist and translator.

K. P. S. Jochum is an Emeritus Professor of Universität Bamberg and the compiler of W. B. Yeats: A Classified Bibliography of Criticism (2nd ed., rev. and enlarged, 1990), of which he is currently preparing a new, online edition for InteLex. He is editor of The Reception of W. B. Yeats in Europe (2006).

Neil Mann teaches at the Escuela Diplomática in Madrid. He has written primarily on A Vision and related matters, and maintains the website, http://www.YeatsVision.com, and a blog on aspects of A Vision, http://YeatsVision.blogspot.co.uk. He has been involved with the exhibition on W. B. Yeats currently at the National Library of Ireland, and has written on manuscript notebooks for an associated book.

Phillip L. Marcus is Professor Emeritus of English at Cornell University and Professor of English at Florida International University. He is the author of Yeats and the Beginning of the Irish Renaissance and Yeats and Artistic Power, and editor of The Death of Cuchulain: Manuscript Materials, co-editor of The Secret Rose, Stories by W. B. Yeats: A Variorum Edition, and co-general editor of the Cornell Yeats Series.

Christopher Rush is a Scottish writer, and was for thirty years a teacher of literature. His books include Resurrection of a Kind (1984), A Twelvemonth and a Day (1985), Peace Comes Dropping Slow (1989), Into the Ebb (1989), Last Lesson of the Afternoon (1994), To Travel Hopefully (2006), Hellfire and Herring (2006), Will (2007), and Sex, Lies and Shakespeare (2009). A neighbour of Derry and Jeanne Jeffares on the Fife peninsula, he was Jeffares’ obituarist.

Ann Saddlemyer has published extensively on Irish and Canadian theatre, and has edited the plays of J. M. Synge, Lady Gregory, and the letters between the founding Directors of the Abbey Theatre. She has edited The Collected Leters of John Millington Synge and her Becoming George: The Life of Mrs W. B. Yeats was published in 2002 and is reviewed in this volume. Her W. B. Yeats and George Yeats: The Letters was puiblished in 2011. In a long teaching career she has taught at the University of Victoria, B.C., was Berg Chair at New York University, and has been Director of the Graduate Centre for the Study of Drama and Master of Massey College in the University of Toronto.

Ronald Schuchard is Emeritus Goodrich C. White Professor at Emory University and General Editor of The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot (forthcoming, Faber and Johns Hopkins). His books include The Last Minstrels: Yeats and the Revival of the Bardic Arts (reviewed in this volume) and Eliot’s Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art (1999). He co-edited vols. 3-5 of The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats.

Colin Smythe is presently working on a new bibliography of W. B. Yeats, correcting, enlarging and updating that by Alan Wade (3rd edition, 1968). He is General Editor of his publishing company’s Irish Literary Studies Series (53 titles), and (with the late T. R. Henn) the Coole Edition of Lady Gregory’s Works (16 volumes so far published), and with Henry Summerfield, the Collected Works of G.W.Russell (AE). He is also Sir Terry Pratchett’s literary agent (and first publisher). He received an Hon. LLD from Dublin University for services to Irish Literature in 1998.

Deirdre Toomey is editor of Yeats and Women: Yeats Annual No. 9 (1991), revised and augmented as Yeats and Women (Macmillan, 1997). She is co-editor of The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, Volume II, 1896-1900 (1997) and Mythologies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

Helen Vendler is A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University. Among her many books are Yeats’s Vision and the Later Plays (1963), Poets Thinking, Coming of Age as a Poet, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Her Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (2007) is reviewed in this volume

Editor’s Introduction

IN EARLY 1937, a schoolboy editor at The High School, Harcourt St., Dublin sought a poem from an old boy for The Erasmian. Yeats obliged with ‘What Then’, recently published in an annual anthology in London, but uncollected. Yeats told the editor that it was ‘one of the few poems he had written lately that might be fit for a school magazine’ (NC 378).

The Living Stream is the first set of essays in memory of that editor, Alexander Norman Jeffares, and the quoted allusion in its title pays tribute to the tradition of commentary that he founded. Jeffares, a man of enormous energy and practical force, whose life is more fully described in the opening essay by his friend the Scottish writer Christopher Rush, a neighbour in the Fife Ness peninsula where Derry (as he was universally known to those scholars he trained or encouraged) and Jeanne Jeffares lived in their retirement years. It might well be said that one of the principal deployments in his Trinity College, Dublin doctorate (for a contemporary image of its author, see Plate 22) which later became A Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats (1968) is of passages across Yeats’s work to which poems make allusion, or which cast light upon the meanings of poems. In order to see just what Jeffares was on to, it is necessary to go back to 1926, when an aspiring Australian actor and writer met Yeats, as she recalled in 1980 when lecturing to the Library of Congress. Her mother, she said, ‘bore me in the Southern wild’, and brought her up, filled with the poetry of an Ireland the more intense for being utterly remote. Here is how she got there.

‘Hardly W. B. Yeats,’ said father once, when my mother showed him a scrap of mine. And remembering it now I feel bound to agree with him, though at the age of seven it would have been hard even for Yeats to be W.B. Yeats. My father, as you see, perhaps because he was so far away from her, was in love with Cathleen ni Houlihan. Nothing that Ireland did was wrong, nothing that other countries did was completely right…. I was drenched in the Celtic twilight before I ever came to it. Indeed I only came to it when it was over and had practically turned into night. I had dreamed of it all my life and although my father was long dead, I had to test what my childhood had taught me. So the first thing I did on arriving in England was to send a piece of writing to A.E. (George Russell), who was then editor of The Irish Statesman. With all the hauteur of youth I deliberately sent no covering letter, just a stamped addressed envelope for return. And sure enough the stamped envelope came back, as I had fully expected it to do, but inside—instead of my manuscript—was a check for three guineas and a letter from A.E. It said ‘If you have any more, please let me see them and if you are ever in Ireland let us meet.’…. Even if I hadn’t been already going to Ireland I would have been off on the next train.

That was how I came under the wing of A.E. and got to know Yeats and the gifted people in their circle, all of whom cheerfully licked me into shape like a set of mother cats with a kitten….1

This was in 1925 when Pamela Travers quickly became the ‘pet and protégée’ first of Russell who published her sub-Yeatsian verses in The Irish Homestead. Back in the West in the late summer of 1926, Travers remembered that her train back to Dublin would pass Lough Gill, so she ‘leapt from the carriage and charged a boatman’ to take her to Innisfree. He assured her that there was no such place.

‘Oh, but there is, I assure you. W. B. Yeats wrote about it.’ ‘And who would he be?’ I told him. ‘Ah, I know them, those poets, always stravaging through their minds, inventing outlandish things. We call it Rat Island!’ Rat Island! Well!

So we set out, under grey hovering clouds, with me in the bows and a young priest, who suddenly arose out of the earth, it seemed, joining us in the stern. At last, after a rough passage, there was Innisfree. No hive for the honeybee and no log cabin but of course I hadn’t expected them. They were only in the bee-loud glade of Yeats’s stravaging mind. But the whole island was covered with rowan trees, wearing their red berries like jewels and the thought suddenly came to me—a most disastrous one, as it turned out—‘I’ll take back some branches to the poet.’ In no time, for the island is diminutive, I had broken off pretty nearly every branch from the rowans and was staggering with them toward the boat. By now a strong wind had sprung up and the rain was falling and the lake was wild. Those Irish loughs beat up into a great sea very quickly. As we embarked, the waves seemed as high as the Statue of Liberty and I wished I’d had more swimming practice. Then I noticed, between one trough and the next, that the priest, pale as paper, was telling his beads with one hand and with the other plucking off my rowan berries and dropping them into the water. ‘Ah, Father,’ said the boatman, pulling stertorously on the oars, ‘it’s not the weight of a berry or two that will save us now.’ He gave me a reflective glance and I got the idea, remembering that in times of shipwreck women are notoriously unlucky, that he was planning to throw me overboard, if the worse came to the worst. I wished I had a string of beads! However, perhaps because of the priest’s prayers, we came at last safely to shore. I hurried through the rain with my burden and took the next train for Dublin. The other passengers edged away from my streaming garments as though I were some sort of ancient mariner. I should never have started this, I knew, but there is an unfortunate streak of obstinacy in me that would not let me stop. From Dublin station, through curtains of cloud—taxis did not exist for me in those days—I carried the great branches to Yeats’s house in Merrion Square and stood there, with my hair like rats’ tails, my tattered branches equally ratlike, looking like Birnam come to Dunsinane and wishing I was dead. I prayed, as I rang the bell, that Yeats would not open the door himself, but my prayer went unheard.

For an articulate man to be struck dumb is, you can imagine, rare. But struck dumb he was at the sight of me. In shame, I heard him cry a name into the dark beyond of the house and saw him hurriedly escape upstairs. Then the name came forward in human shape and took me gently, as though I were ill or lost or witless, down to the basement kitchen. There I was warmed and dried and given cocoa; the dreadful branches were taken away. I felt like someone who had died and was now contentedly on the other side, certain that nothing more could happen. In this dreamlike state, I was gathering myself to go—out the back way if possible—never to be seen again. But a maid came bustling kindly in and said—as though to someone still alive!—‘The master will see you now.’ I was horrified. This was the last straw. ‘What for?’ I wanted to know. ‘Ah, then, you’ll see. He has his ways.’

And so, up the stairs—or the seven-story mountain—I went and there he was in his room with the blue curtains.

‘My canary has laid an egg!’ he said and joyously led me to the cages by the window. From there we went round the room together, I getting better every minute and he telling me which of his books he liked and how, when he got an idea for a poem. There was long momentous pause, here. He was always the bard, always filling the role of poet, not play-acting but knowing well the role’s requirements and giving them their due. He never came into a room, he entered it; walking around his study was a ceremonial peregrination, wonderful to witness. ‘When I get an idea for a poem,’ he went on, oracularly, ‘I take down one of my own books and read it and then I go on from there.’ Moses explaining his tablets couldn’t have moved me more. And so, serenely, we came to the end of the pilgrimage and I was just about to bid him good-bye when I noticed on his desk a vase of water and in it one sprig of fruiting rowan. I glanced at him distrustfully. ‘Was he teaching me a lesson?’ I wondered, for at that age one cannot accept to be taught. But he wasn’t; I knew it by the look on his face. He would do nothing so banal. He was not trying to enlighten me and so I was enlightened and found a connection in the process. It needed only a sprig, said the lesson. And I learned, also, something about writing. The secret is to say less than you need. You don’t want a forest, a leaf will do.

Next day, when I was lunching with A.E., he said to me, ‘Yeats was very touched that you brought him a sprig of rowan from Innisfree.’ So I had to tell him the whole story’2

Pamela Travers applied this lesson of retreading the grapes, rummaging around in her poems and stories, and shaping the Mary Poppins books out of them. By then she had become a darling of the circle of ‘Poets and Wits’ who drew around Yeats and A.E., Stephens, Colum, O’Faolain, and Gogarty, who bombarded her with love poems and dedicated An Offering of Swans to her.

Many of those who pay tribute in this volume to this great and pioneering Yeats scholar are themeselves senior scholars. While their essays contain to a greater or a lesser degreee memories of him, for each it is a matter of carrying forward in some particular way the work he had pioneered in his TCD doctorate, the work of commentary. Derry Jeffares seems to have understood the same self-reflexive principle at work in Yeats’s writing, because so much of his pioneering work on what became the Commentary is dependent upon the elaborate structure he built therein for the cross-referencing of Yeats’s poems, letters, prose, and plays. For this reason above all, he showed himself to be truly one of those whom Yeats (following Boehme, as he thought) referred to as his ‘schoolmates’ (E&I xi) one of that inner circle of readers for whom a writer writes. It is fair to say that the better editions of Yeats’s works which have followed down the years can be distinguished from the rest by their annotation’s having grown from such strategies of self-allusion as Yeats himself encouraged.

This volume joins the last three interlinked special issues of Yeats Annual all of which have had for their broader theme the notion that the impetus for new writing may often be found in the poet’s reading and in the collaborative nature of literary endeavour, matters revealed to scholars by the restoration of contexts to poems increasingly distant from us. The volume has, however, been unconscionably delayed by the illnesses of the Editor and Research Editor, for which delay we apologise to all contributors, and thank them for their patience.

WARWICK GOULD

7 DECEMBER 2012

Footnotes

1 P. L. Travers, ‘Only Connect’ in Virginia Havilland (ed.) The Openhearted Audience (Washington, Library of Congress, 1980), pp. 9-11.

2Ibid., 11-14

Acknowledgements and Editorial Information

OUR CHIEF DEBT of gratitude is to the Yeats Estate over many years for granting permission (through A. P. Watt Ltd.) to use published and unpublished materials by W. B. Yeats. Many of our contributors are further indebted to the Yeats family and Estate for making unpublished materials available for study and for many other kindnesses, as is the Editor.

A number of helpful librarians include Dr Declan Kiely of the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York; Professor Thomas F. Staley, Dr Cathy Henderson and Dr Richard Oram at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Austin; Catherine Fahy at the National Library of Ireland; all of whom have provided us with materials and research assistance. At the British Library, the Curator of the Macmillan Archive, Dr Elizabeth James, renders continuous assistance to the Editor, while the research librarians at the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory University are equally generous and prompt in recovering specialist materials. Christine Wise and Dr Karen Attar in Special Collections at the Senate House Library, University of London have also been unfailingly helpful. Many other scholars and librarians have been thanked within the compass of individual contributions to this volume. Riette Sturge Moore (who died in 1995) allowed us to use on the front board of Yeats Annuals a symbol adapted from Thomas Sturge Moore’s designs for the H. P. R. Finberg translation of Axël (1925). Linda Shaughnessy of A. P. Watt & Son, Professors Roy Foster, F.B.A. and John Kelly on behalf of OUP were most generous with permissions. Individuals, institutions and estates which gave permission for the reproductions of images in the Plate section are thanked within the legends. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders, and while some images are by unknwon photographers, the editor would be grateful to acknowledge any omissions in the next issue.

At Open Book Publishers, William St. Clair FBA, Rupert Gatti and Alessandra Tosi provided patient assistance and invaluable advice to facilitate our transfer to open access publishing. Members of the Advisory Board continue to read a large number of submissions and we are grateful to them, and also to Mr R. A. Gilbert and other specialist readers who offered valuable assistance. We remain grateful to Dr Conor Wyer and Miss Zoe Holman of the Institute of English Studies, and to Ms Kerry Whitston in the School of Advanced Study, for their work in setting the volume in Caslon SSi. Readers may recall that Caslon Old Face was the typeface which Yeats himself preferred for Cuala Press books.

Deirdre Toomey as Research Editor of this journal continues to take up the challenges which routinely defeat contributors, finding innumerable ways to make good articles better by means of her restless curiosity and indefatigable reading. All associated with the volume (as well as its readers) continue to be grateful for her unavailing assistance.

Contributions for Yeats Annual No. 19 are largely in place, and those for No. 20 should reach me, preferably by email, by 1 January 2014 at:

The Institute of English Studies University of London, Senate House Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU United Kingdom E-mail: [email protected].

Yeats Annual is offered to its publishers in camera-ready form. A style sheet, instructions for the submission of articles to the Editorial Board and consequent editorial procedures will be found at our website, www.sas.ac.uk/ies/Yeats/yeatsannual.html, where it is also possible to find full information about, and to purchase, in-print numbers from the Yeats Annual backlist. The website is being further developed to complement the online and print availability of the current issues through openbookpublishers.com.

Professor John Kelly of St. John’s College, Oxford is General Editor of The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats. Later years of the letters are now available in the InteLex electronic edition, which presently includes only the first three fully annotated volumes as well as the ‘B’ text of all subsequent letters which have come to light. Priority in the publication of newly discovered letters remains, however, with the print-based volumes, the fifth of which is now in proof sat the Clarendon Press. The electronic edition will apparently continue to be updated to absorb the new materials. Colin Smythe (PO Box 6, Gerrards Cross, Bucks, SL9 8XA, UK, [email protected]) is completing his revision of the Wade-Alspach Bibliography for the Clarendon Press, while an authorised edition of Yeats’s Occult Diaries, 1898-1901 is being prepared for Palgrave Macmillan, again by Deirdre Toomey and myself. We continue to revise A. Norman Jeffares’ New Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats. All the above would be very grateful to hear of new letters, and to receive new information from readers.

We are grateful to receive offprints and review copies and other bibliographical information (acknowledged at the end of each volume).

WARWICK GOULD

ESSAYS IN MEMORY OF

A. NORMAN JEFFARES

1920-2005

Professor Alexander Norman Jeffares

11 August 1920-1 June 2005

Christopher Rush

IN 1937 A DUBLIN SCHOOLBOY approached no less a person than W. B. Yeats with a request that he write a poem for the school magazine of which he was the editor. He was informed rather haughtily that the poet was not at that moment writing anything that would be ‘suitable’ for mere schoolboys. The mere schoolboy persisted. In that case wasn’t it about time that he did write something suitable and let him have it? A week later one of Yeats’s finest poems, ‘What Then?’ arrived in the post and was duly published that April in the school magazine, The Erasmian.

The High School was Yeats’s old school—he’d been a pupil there in the 1880s—and the schoolboy was Alexander Norman Jeffares, who went on to become one of the most distinguished Yeats scholars of the 20th century, although his first degree in Trinity College Dublin (TCD) was in Classics. This early pioneering spirit, seen in the enterprising adolescent, turned out to be typical. Here was a teenage boy telling the Nobel Prizewinner and the greatest living poet writing in English to get on with it and produce something appropriate to the occasion. Also typically, the person he was badgering obliged, to the benefit of Anglo-Irish letters. That was Derry Jeffares in a nutshell: a prodder and provoker, a facilitator, determined to stir things up and make them happen when they might have seemed moribund or extinct or resistant to change.

Change was on the way when he was born, of southern county Protestant stock—on 11th August 1920—during the Irish War of Independence. That too was appropriate. Derry (as he was universally known) was destined to fight his own wars in changing the face of English and Anglo-Irish studies (the latter he practically invented) in Britain and Ireland and abroad during the next half century.

After leaving the High School he entered TCD in 1939, opting for Classics partly because English was a split subject which had to be done with a Modern Language and his French was not up to it. After four years of turf fires and gowns worn over overcoats in freezing lecture halls and libraries, Derry graduated, glad to leave Classics behind him. (‘Classics? Too much work! All that bloody memorising! English by comparison was easy. You read a few books, you got across your ideas on them—and that was it!’). He could speak about the difference, having taken on English as well—for fun and for show, again typically. Classics, however, had groomed him in strenuous and disciplined stables and he was now ready for the chase.

The first hurdle was not so much the PhD as the choice of subject. After some thrashing around, a friend read to him a poem by the now dead Yeats (he’d died soon after writing the required school mag piece) and asked him, ‘What the hell does it mean?’ Derry had no idea and his curiosity was aroused. So a dinner party was concocted at the Unicorn restaurant, Mount Street, at which it was arranged that he should meet Yeats’s widow. She told Derry that he was welcome to be let loose on her late husband’s books and papers at 46 Palmerston Road. Joe Hone, the official biographer, had been there before him, but in entering Yeats’s library with an impartial mind, Derry was the first scholar to begin to probe the mind of the poet, a man’s library being, after all, an index to his mind. ‘Take anything you like,’ Mrs Yeats said, though she was liable to ring at three o’clock in the morning and demand the immediate return of a diary or a manuscript. She was a good critic of her husband’s work, in spite of being eccentric and awkward.

There were other difficulties. The Yeats texts were out of print and Macmillan didn’t reprint them during the war. The Collected Poems took him ages to obtain and cost a fabulous fifteen pounds. But Derry was always a swift worker and he set his life’s pattern by completing it in 1¼ years instead of three, submitting it for his doctorate at Easter 1945 (eventually it was to emerge as the Commentaryon Yeats’s poems, published in 1968) and in April 1945 went to Oxford where he wrote the D.Phil thesis which was to see the light of day as his first major publication, W.B. Yeats: Man and Poet, in 1948.

The following year Richard Ellmann published his book, Yeats: the Man and the Masks. There couldn’t have been a greater contrast. Ellmann’s was an over-determined thesis, written on the assumption that you can mine a life of a writer purely out of his works. Derry acknowledged that Yeats had a life as well as having written some poems, and his biography is much more faithful to the man and therefore, in the end, to his mind and his works. Ironically, the radically oversimplified and schematic Ellmann book had a better popular life than Derry’s because it gave students a key to Yeats and obviated any necessity to think for themselves about the answers to the difficult questions raised by a study of his poetry. A philosophy of making people explore rather than handing them something on a plate was central to Derry’s life as an academic.

At Oriel he was supervised by David Nichol Smith, the kingmaker of his day, on whom to some extent he was to model himself. But in spite of his liking for lecturers such as Nevill Coghill, he found Oxford on the whole a dull and dreary institution, run by boring and complacent dons—or bad-mannered ones like C. S. Lewis (‘a northern boor’) who in Derry’s eyes at least treated staff and students alike with contempt. If there was one thing Derry Jeffares hated it was academic rudeness and pomposity. He had no time for it.

In April 1946 he began his university career as a lector in English at the University of Groningen. After a year there he married the love of his life, Jeanne Calembert, whose Belgian father, a spy for British Intelligence in German-occupied Belgium during the First War, had married her Scottish mother in the Congo and died young, leaving mother and daughter to settle in Edinburgh, where Jeanne attended George Watson’s Ladies’ College and Edinburgh University. Derry had met her in 1942 when he was over from TCD taking part in an inter-university debate.

When they left Holland at Christmas 1948 Jeanne was pregnant with their only daughter, Bo. Getting out was a bureaucratic nightmare. Derry had to swear an oath to the Dutch queen that he would take good care of his wife. Little did the Queen of Holland appreciate the extent and depth to which the swearer would keep his word. The final hurdle was Jeanne’s condition, which by Dutch law debarred her from flying. She got round this by tying a cushion to her behind, so as to look like all other Dutch women. The ruse worked and the couple arrived in Dublin.

Bo was born on the first day of the new year and by that time Derry was now a lecturer in English at Edinburgh university, living on a salary of just over ten pounds a week. One day he spent some of his pittance (in Elliot’s bookshop at the Waverley end of Princes Street) on some second-hand books. They had belonged to the distinguished scholar Herbert Grierson, who had pioneered the study of Donne in much the same way as Derry was doing with Yeats. ‘But Professor Grierson is still alive,’ he said to the bookseller.’ ‘How on earth did you persuade him to part with his books?’ The bookseller laughed. ‘Persuade him? He comes down with a taxi full of them. You see, he likes his dram of an evening but he can’t afford it on the pension he gets.’ This incident had a profound effect on the young lecturer. Here was one of the most distinguished academics of his day whose pension didn’t even run to a bottle of whisky. Derry was determined not to come out of academia into penurious old age. The answer lay in publishing. By the time he died he had over three hundred publications to his name: scores of articles, dozens of books and editions, and a variety of influential series which he had engineered. What pupil hasn’t used York Notes? What student or general reader hasn’t encountered Writers and Critics?

He also decided that Edinburgh University was not the place to establish financial security. The administration treated him shabbily and after two and a half years he left in July 1951 for a Chair in Adelaide, also leaving a salary of £600 for one of £1600. Here he stayed for six happy years, the Chair allowing him scope for his ideas, and the country and climate encouraging in him a taste for good wine, one which he continued to refine to the end of his life.

In 1957 he received a letter from the Vice-Chancellor of Leeds University asking if he’d be interested in taking over the Chair from Bonamy Dobrée. Derry was interested, but on one condition: expansion, backed by money. The promise was made and the Jeffares arrived in Leeds at the same time as Harold Macmillan entered 10 Downing Street. Change was in the air, in the country, in the Commonwealth, and in their universities. For the English Department in Leeds it was the start of an astonishing period of transformation. Derry built up the School of English into the biggest and one of the best in the country; brought Language and Literature together (they didn’t even co-operate at the time he took over the Chair); successfully reformed the timetable with a view to enhancing student performance and cutting the failure rate; created Chairs in American Literature, Commonwealth Literature and Contemporary English Language as well as having the usual Chairs in Language and Literature; organised the first Commonwealth Literature Conference ever held in the UK, well ahead of its time in 1964; introduced studies in Bibliography, Dialectology, Folklife, Irish Literature and Modern English Language, adding these to the core courses in Old and Middle English and Literature; founded a Workshop Theatre; introduced four main types of BA Honours so that students could concentrate on the areas that appealed to them; brought scholars and students to Leeds from all around the world and encouraged his own staff to gain experience and conduct research abroad; and he attracted luminaries to Leeds to lecture on their disciplines—Noam Chomsky, Iris Murdoch. Many Commonwealth writers of distinction were his students, such as the Nobel prize winner Wole Soyinka. In the areas of Literature and Language his influence on British and Commonwealth universities was incalculable. Not surprisingly he became known as The Kingmaker and Leeds was the royal matrix of many a shining career.

Through all of this Yeats remained the centre of his own scholarly and critical focus. The original biography was revised, selections edited, commentaries, collections of essays, summer schools masterminded, and later a whole new complete edition and a new biography were to appear. But his many publications extend well beyond Yeats, covering Congreve, Farquhar, Swift, Gogarty, Moore, and range well beyond the field of Irish studies, embracing English, Commonwealth and American literature. He edited A Review of English Literature, ARIEL, and the Macmillan History of Literature