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YEATS AND WOMEN In the same series

YEATS ANNUALS Nos 1, 2 Edited by Richard J. Finneran YEATS ANNUALS Nos 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Edited by Warwick Gould Maud Gonne, c. 1900. YEATS AND WOMEN

Edited by Deirdre Toomey

Yeats Annual No.9

A Special Number Series Editor: Warwick Gould

M © Deirdre Toomey 1992 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1992 978-0-333-53647-6 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 33-4 Alfred Place, London WCIE 7DP.

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First published 1992 by MACMILLAN ACADEMIC AND PROFESSIONAL LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world

ISBN 978-1-349-11930-1 ISBN 978-1-349-11928-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-11928-8 ISSN 0278-7688

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Contents

List of Abbreviations ix Editorial Board Xl Notes on the Contributors Xll List of Plates XVl Editor's Introduction XlX Acknowledgements XXll

ARTICLES AND TRANSLATION 3

"Secret Communion": Yeats's Sexual Destiny JOHN HARWOOD 3 At the Feet of the Goddess: Yeats's Love Poetry and the Feminist Occult ELIZABETH BUTLER CULLINGFORD 31 Patronage and Creative Exchange: Yeats, Lady Gregory and the Economy of Indebtedness JAMES PETHICA 60 Labyrinths: Yeats and Maud Gonne DEIRDRE TOOMEY 95 "The Music of Heaven": Dorothea Hunter WARWICK GOULD 132 The Eugenics Movement in the 1930s and the Emergence of On the Boiler DAVID BRADSHAW 189 : Letters toW. B. Yeats, 1912-17 Edited by JOSEPHINE JOHNSON 216

v VI Contents

"Le Don d'Haroun Al-Rachid" Translated by JEAN-YVES MASSON 255

SHORTER NOTES 261 Georges Gonne and the Soul of the King of Ireland CONRAD A. BALLIET 263 Maud Gonne: Some Impressions A. NORMAN JEFFARES 266 George Yeats, and P. S. O'Hegarty: Notes from the Libraries WAYNE K. CHAPMAN 271 Books by W. B. Yeats in 's Library WARWICK GOULD 295 "What is the explanation of it all?": Nothing and Something DEIRDRE TOOMEY 309 "Images": Unpublished Tableaux of Opposition NEIL MANN 313

REVIEWS 321 Lives 323 A. Norman Jeffares, W. B. Yeats: A New Biography HELEN VENDLER 323 John Harwood, Olivia Shakespear and W. B. Yeats: After Long Silence MARJORIE PERLOFF 329 Margaret Ward, Maud Gonne: Ireland's Joan of Arc Margery Brady, The Love Story of Yeats and Maud Gonne DEIRDRE TOOMEY 336 Diana Souhami, Gluck 1895-1978: Her Biography WARWICK GOULD 342 Wayne McKenna, W. J. Turner, Poet and Music Critic A. NORMAN JEFFARES 348 Contents vn

Editions and Manuscripts 351 The Collected Edition of the Works of W. B. Yeats: Vol. VI Prifaces and Introductions, edited by William H. O'Donnell; Vol. VII Letters to the New Island: A New Edition, edited by George Bornstein and Hugh Witemeyer A. NORMAN JEFFARES 351

Yeats Deregulated: Hazard Adams, The Book of Yeats's Poems; The Poems, edited by Daniel Albright; The Collected Edition of the Works of W. B. Yeats: Vol. I The Poems Revised, edited by Richard J. Finneran; The Collected Poems: A New Edition, edited by Richard]. Finneran; Richard J. Finneran, Editing Yeats's Poems: A Reconsideration; Collected Poems, edited by Augustine Martin WARWICK GOULD 356

Yeats's Poems, edited and annotated by A. Norman Jeffares, with an appendix by Warwick Gould WILLIAM H. O'DONNELL 373

A Vision and Related Writings, selected and edited by A. Norman Jeffares COLIN McDOWELL 377

The Love Poems, edited with an introduction and notes by A. Norman Jeffares ELIZABETH BUTLER CULLINGFORD 380

The Writing of Sophocles' King Oedipus: Manuscripts of W. B. Yeats, transcribed, edited and with a commentary by David R. Clark and James B. McGuire RICHARD ALLEN CAVE 382

Conrad A. Balliet, assisted by Christine Mawhinney, W. B. Yeats: A Census of the Manuscripts WAYNE K. CHAPMAN 390 Vlll Contents

Studies, Collections and Productions 397 The Poet at the Roulette Table: A. Norman Jeffares (ed.), Yeats the European JOHN HARWOOD 397 Frank Kinahan, Yeats, Folklore and Occultism: Contexts of the Early Work and Thought KIERAN QUINLAN 400 Jacqueline Genet, La Poitique de William Butler Yeats ADOLPHE HABERER 403 Jacqueline Genet (ed.), Studies on W. B. Yeats WAYNE K. CHAPMAN 405 Seamus Heaney, The Place of Writing JOHN HARWOOD 408 Here Comes Everybody: Susan Dick, Declan Kiberd, Dougald McMillan and Joseph Ronsley (eds), Omnium Gatherum: Essays for Richard Ellmann ANDREW GIBSON 410 James Richardson, Vanishing Lives: Style and Self in Tennyson, D. G. Rossetti, Swinburne, and Yeats PAMELA BICKLEY 413 Loreto Todd, The Language of Irish Literature KATIE 416 Michael Allen and Angela Wilcox ( eds), Critical Approaches to Anglo-Irish Literature MARIA KURDI 420 Karl Beckson, Ian Fletcher, Lawrence W. Markert and John Stokes, Arthur Symons: A Bibliography BRUCE MORRIS 424 Karl Beckson and John M. Munro (eds), Arthur Symons: Selected Letters, 1880-1935 DEIRDRE TOOMEY 428 Yeats's Cuchulain Cycle at the , September 1989 RICHARD ALLEN CAVE 430

PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED 439 List of Abbreviations

The works listed below are cited in the texts by abbreviation and page number. Some individual essays use additional abbreviations, as ex• plained in the appropriate notes.

Au Autobiographies .(London: Macmillan, 1955). AVA A Critical Edition of Yeats's ( 1925), ed. George Mills Harper and Walter Kelly Hood (London: Macmillan, 1978). AVB A Vision (London: Macmillan, 1962). CLI The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, vol. 1: 1865-95, ed. John Kelly and Eric Domville (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). E&I Essays and Introductions (London and New York: Macmillan, 1961). Ex Explorations, sel. Mrs W. B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1962; New York: Macmillan, 1963), L The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954; New York: Macmillan, 1955). LDW Letters on Poetry from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley, intra. Kathleen Raine (London and New York: Oxford Univer• sity Press, 1964). LMR "Ah, Sweet Dancer": W. B. Yeats/Margot Ruddock, a Correspon• dence, ed. Roger McHugh (London and New York: Mac• millan, 1970). LNI Letters to the New Island, ed. Horace Reynolds (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1934). LRB The Correspondence of Robert Bridges and W. B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran (London: Macmillan, 1977; Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1978). LTSM 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). LTWBY Letters toW. B. Yeats, ed. Richard]. Finneran, George Mills ix X List of Abbreviations

Harper and William M. Murphy (London: Macmillan; New York: Columbia University Press, 1977). Mem Memoirs, ed. Denis Donoghue (London: Macmillan, 1972; New York: Macmillan, 1973). Myth Mythologies (London and New York: Macmillan, 1959). OBMV The Oxford Book of Modem Verse, 1892-1935, chosen by W. B. Yeats (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936). SB The Speckled Bird, With Variant Versions, ed. William H. O'Donnell (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1976). ss The Senate Speeches of W. B. Yeats, ed. Donald R. Pearce (London: Faber and Faber, 1961). UP1 Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats, vol. 1, 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 ColtonJohnson (London: Macmillan, 1975; New York: Columbia University Press, 1976). VP The Variorum Edition of the Poems ofW. B. Yeats, ed. Peter Alit and Russell K. Alspach (New York and London: Macmil• lan, 1957). (To be cited from the corrected third printing [ 1966] or later printings.) VPl The Variorum Edition of the Plays ofW. B. Yeats, ed. Russell K. Alspach (London and New York: Macmillan, 1966). (To be cited from the corrected second printing [1966] or later printings.) VSR The Secret Rose: Stories by W. B. Yeats: A Variorum Edition, ed. Phillip L. Marcus, Warwick Gould and Michael J. Sidnell (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981; 2nd edn Lon• don: Macmillan, 1991). References are to the 1st edn unless otherwise specified. Wade Allan Wade, A Bibliography of the Writings ojW. B. Yeats, 3rd edn, rev. Russell K. Alspach (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1968). YA Yeats Annual (to be followed by number and date). YAACTS Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies (to be followed by number and date). YL Edward O'Shea, A Descriptive Catalog ofW. B. Yeats's Library (New York and London: Garland, 1985). YO Yeats and the Occult, ed. George Mills Harper (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1975; London: Macmillan, 1975). YT Yeats and the Theatre, ed. Robert O'Driscoll and Lorna Reynolds (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1975; London: Macmillan, 1975). Editorial Board

Seamus Deane William H. O'Donnell Denis Donoghue Yukio Oura Jacqueline Genet Marjorie Perloff John Harwood Kathleen Raine A. Norman Jeffares Ronald Schuchard K. P. S. Jochum Michael J. Sid nell JohnS. Kelly Colin Smythe Edna Longley C. K. Stead Phillip L. Marcus Katharine Worth

Editor: Warwick Gould Research Editor: Deirdre Toomey

XI Notes on the Contributors

Conrad A. Balliet is Professor of English at Wittenberg University, Ohio. His W. B. Yeats: A Census of the Manuscripts is reviewed in this volume.

Pamela Bickley teaches at W. B. Yeats's old school, now the Godol• phin and Latymer School, Hammersmith, and in the English Depart• ment, Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, University of London, where she is completing a doctoral thesis on D. G. Rossetti.

David Bradshaw is Hawthornden Fellow in English at Worcester College, Oxford, and a university lecturer in English. His The Persuasion of the Few: Aldous Huxley's Ideological Development will be published shortly by Oxford University Press. His biography of Aldous Huxley is scheduled for the Huxley centenary in 1994 (Faber and Faber).

Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, formerly Director of the Yeats Inter• national Summer School, Sligo, is Associate Professor of English, University of Texas at Austin, author of Yeats, Ireland and Fascism (1980) and editor of Yeats: Poems, 1919-1935: A Casebook (1984). She is working on a book on Yeats's love poetry.

Richard Allen Cave is Professor of Drama and Theatre Studies at Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, University of London. The editor of Moore's Hail and Farewell and The Lake, he is General Editor of the Theatre in Focus series. His most recent book is New British Drama in Performance on the London Stage, 1970-1985.

Wayne K. Chapman teaches at Kansas State University. His Yeats and English Renaissance Poetry was published by Macmillan in 1991. He is the author of several articles on Yeats's library, and on the textual evidence of Yeats's working copies of his own books. He is preparing a genetic study of the manuscripts and prompt-books of The Countess Cathleen.

Xll Notes on the Contributors Xlll

Andrew Gibson is Senior Lecturer in English at Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, University of London, and author of Reading Narrative Discourse: Studies in the Novel from Cervantes to Beckett (Macmil• lan, 1990). Other publications include articles on modem Irish, French and American literature. He is editing E;:.ra Pound in Multiple Perspective for Macmillan, and working on a study of the structure of Ulysses. He is founder and director of the University of London Ulysses Seminar.

Warwick Gould is Reader in English Literature at Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, University of London. He is the co-author (with Maijorie Reeves) of Joachim of Fiore and the Myth of the Eternal Evangel in the Nineteenth Century ( 1987) and co-editor of The Secret Rose. Stories by W. B. Yeats: A- Variorum Edition (1981; 2nd edn, rev. and enlarged, 1991). He is working with collaborators on The Collected Letters, vol. II: 1896-1900, and on Early Essays and Mythologies (2 vols) for the Macmillan Collected Works. He is Editor of Yeats Annual. His Yeats's Permanent Self: A Chapter of Textual Biography will be published by Macmillan in 1992.

Adolphe Haberer teaches English at the University Lumiere-Lyon 2. He is the author of Louis MacNeice: l'homme et la poesie and he has written on Yeats, Ted Hughes, Dylan Thomas, Heaney and Mahon.

John Harwood is Associate Dean of the School of Humanities at the Flinders University of South Australia. He is the author of Olivia Shakespear and W. B. Yeats: After Long Silence, reviewed in this volume. He has edited Shakespear's letters to Yeats (YA6). He is currently preparing The Myth of Modernism for Macmillan.

A. Norman Jeffares has held chairs at the Universities of Stirling, Leeds and Adelaide. His first book was W. B. Yeats: Man and Poet ( 1949) and his many studies and editions of Yeats include A New Commentary on the Poems ofW. B. Yeats (1984), W. B. Yeats: A New Biography (1989) and A Vision and Related Writings ( 1990). The two last named, his edition of Yeats's Love Poems (1990) and his annotated edition of Yeats's Poems ( 1989; 2nd rev. edn, 1991) are reviewed in this volume. He is Honorary Life President of the International Association for the Study of Anglo• Irish Literature.

Josephine Johnson is Associate Professor of Speech Communication at the University of Miami at Coral Gables. Her Florence Fa": Bernard XlV Notes on the Contributors

Shaw's "New Woman" was published by Colin Smythe in 1975, and she is working upon a new study of British jazz.

Maria Kurdi teaches at janus Pannonius University, Pees, Hungary.

Neil Mann is an English teacher at Radley College, and a research student at Lincoln College, Oxford, where he is writing a doctoral thesis on A Vision.

Jean-Yves Masson teaches at the University of Paris IV, Sorbonne. He has embarked on a major series of translations of Yeats's poems into French, beginning with and Michael Robartes and the Dancer ( 1991 ) , to be followed by in 1992.

Colin McDowell is a public servant in the Australian Bureau of Census and Statistics and an associate editor of Scripsi. He is the author of many articles on Yeats, A Vision and .

Bruce Morris received his PhD from the University of Denver in 1977. He has written widely upon Arthur Symons, and he is currently working on a study of the friendship between Symons and W. B. Yeats.

William H. O'Donnell is Professor and Chairman of the English Department at Memphis State University. He is well known for his edition of Yeats's novel The Speckled Bird (1976) and for his The Poetry of William Butler Yeats: An Introduction ( 1986). His edition of Prefaces and Introductions ( 1988) for the Collected Works is reviewed in this volume. He is currently completing an edition of Yeats's Later Essays for the same senes.

Marjorie Perloff is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University, California. She is the author of Rhyme and Meaning in the Poetry of Yeats (1970), and ofmany subsequent studies of modern poetry, including The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant• Guerre, and the Language of Rupture ( 1986). Her latest book is Poetic License (1990).

James Pethica is Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford, where he wrote his doctoral thesis on the emergence of Lady Gregory as a writer. His edition of her diary is forthcoming from Colin Smythe. He is at present finishing a book on Lady Gregory. Notes on the Contributors XV

Kieran Quinlan is Associate Professor of English at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Deirdre Toomey is co-editor of volume 2 of The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats (forthcoming). She is assistant editor (with David Bind• man) of The Graphic Works of William Blake, and the Research Editor of Yeats Annual, as well as guest editor of the present volume.

Helen Vendler is Kenan Professor of English and American Litera• ture at Harvard University. Her first book was Yeats's Vision and the Later Plays (1963); since then she has written books on Stevens, Herbert and Keats, and she is now writing a commentary upon Shakespear's sonnets. Her essays on poetry and criticism have been collected in Part of Nature, Part of Us ( 1980) and The Music of What Happens ( 1987).

Katie Wales is Senior Lecturer in English Language at Royal Hollo• way and Bedford New College, University of London. Her Dictionary of Stylistics was published by Longman in 1989, and The Language ofjames Joyce will soon be published by Macmillan Education. List of Plates

Frontispiece: Maud Go nne c.l900 (dated by costume). Photographed by Reutlinger of Paris for an unidentified journal. Private collection, UK.

Ia, b Gold and watercolour decoration by AE to a preliminary opening of Maud Gonne's presentation copy ofjohn Sherman and Dhoya (1891), with dedicatory verse in the hand ofW. B. Yeats, dated September lst, 1891. The verse was also transcribed into The Flame of the Spirit MS book. Photograph courtesy Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. 2 Maud Gonne. Studio photograph by Chancellor, , dated by costume c.l889. Photograph courtesy National Library of Ireland. 3a, b Coffin and name-plate of Georges Gonne in the crypt of Gonne mausoleum, Samois-sur-Seine, Paris. Photograph courtesy Conrad A. Balliet. 4 Mausoleum of Georges Gonne, Samois-sur-Seine, Paris. Photo• graph courtesy Conrad A. Balliet. 5 Maud Gonne MacBride and Sean MacBride, c.l906. Photo• graph courtesy Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University. 6 (a) The H. S. Mendelssohn photograph of Olivia Shakespear for the Literary Yearbook (1897). (b) AE's oil painting of , n.d. Photograph courtesy the National Gallery of Ire• land. 7 Florence Farr as a young woman, n.d. Photograph courtesy Josephine Johnson. 8 Florence Farr with her pupils at the Ramanathan College, Ceylon. Photograph courtesy Josephine Johnson. 9 Dorothea and Edmund Hunter with their eldest son, Ralph, c.l898. Studio photograph by H. Goulton May, Richmond. Private collection, UK.

XVI List of Plates xvu lOa, b Shrine of Nemkheftka, 19.5 in. long X 9 in. wide X 11.5 in. high, decorated inside and out by Edmund Hunter. Formerly in the possession of Florence Farrand left by her with Dorothea Hunter; now in a private collection, UK. The portraits in watercolour with pastel are probably by Farr. There are no inscriptions on the versos. The lettering visible in the portrait of the (?female) figure in plate lOb is probably Farr's attempt at a "Coptic" inscription. II Maud Gonne, Lugh and Kezan, in the grounds of Roebuck House, Dublin, early 1930s. Photograph courtesy Anna Mac• Bride White and A. Norman Jeffares. 12 W. B. Yeats, Menton, January 1938. Photograph by Nora Shackleton Heald, first published in the London Mercury, March 1939, to accompany "A Bronze Head" and "News for the Delphic Oracle". Photograph courtesy Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University. Editor's Introduction

The young Yeats, as he is reconstructed in Autobiographies, was drawn to and dominated by a group of strong fathers: his Pollexfen grand• father- "Even to-day when I read King Lear his image is always before me, and I often wonder if the delight in passionate men in my plays and in my poetry is more than his memory"; his own father- "My father's influence upon my thoughts was at its height"; John O'Leary - "He had the moral genius that moves all young people"; Henley - "I admired him beyond words"; Wilde- "My first meeting with Oscar Wilde was an astonishment"; Morris - "It was now Morris himself that stirred my interest, and I took to him at first because of some little tricks of speech and body that reminded me of my old grandfather in Sligo, but soon discovered his spontaneity and joy and made him my chief of men"; lastly Mathers - "a figure of romance ... a necessary extravagance". These figures had an essential shaping effect upon Yeats, more permanent than that of the friends of his own age - Russell, Johnson, Symons. Yeats recalls that the influence of his father declined when he was about twenty-three. "When I was in my 'teens I admired my father above all men ... but when I was twenty-three or twenty-four ... we began to quarrel." The break with marks the beginning of the movement away from the group of strong fathers. Yeats's hierarchical sensibility, which demanded objects to admire, to mythologise, to be shaped by, could no longer be satisfied with an adolescent admiration of powerful older men, yet the women whom he befriended as a young man had only a superficial impact upon him: Laura Armstrong seems as typical an object of calf love as does Katharine Tynan a young man's de-sexualised, sisterly confidante. It was at the time of his first meeting with Maud Gonne that he revolted against John Butler Yeats. At this point in Autobiogr(lphies the power of the strong paternal figures was on the cusp and by the mid-l890s Yeats's allegiance was transferring itself from men to

XIX XX Editor's Introduction women: women not merely as icons, sexual objects, muses, but also as companions, mentors, fellow workers. The first overpowering female personality he had encountered was Madame Blavatsky - "A great passionate nature" - but he viewed her as half masculine, a "female Dr. johnson". Then came Maud Gonne: "I had never thought to see in a living woman so great beauty. It belonged to famous pictures, to poetry, to some legendary past.... I remember nothing of her speech that day except that she vexed my father by praise of war." Shortly afterwards he met Florence Farr - "a discovery that was to influence my life"; and then, in 1894, Olivia Shakespear- "the most significant image of those years". It is with Augusta Gregory that Dramatis Personae concludes: "in her last years ... she seemed always her greater self". Of her he had conceded, "I doubt ifl should have done much with my life but for her firmness and her care." All these women were, to a greater or lesser degree, unconventional: a political activist, an actress, a novelist and an aspiring writer. All were economically more powerful than Yeats: it is singular that the women with whom he involved himself, emotionally or otherwise, were always possessed of an inde• pendent income. Maud Gonne's handsome private income gave her that freedom - "the will of the wild birds" - which Yeats admired and resented. His financial relationship with Lady Gregory had deleterious aspects. Florence Farr told Henry Nevinson that Yeats was (in 1905) afraid to marry "for fear of Miss Horniman, Lady Gregory, & the terrors of money". \'Vhereas Yeats will continue to be accused of phallocentrism in his poetry, in ideology and actuality he was not a phallocrat, despite the rhetorical chidings of "". If one assesses the relative importance in Yeats's life of Pound - an authentic phallocrat - and Lady Gregory, one has to conclude that one of the strongest and most aggressive literary person• alities of the twentieth century, hell-bent on mastery, failed to influence Yeats, either as man or as writer, as Lady Gregory succeeded in doing. These relationships were not untroubled. The friendship with Lady Gregory is awash with her unspoken hostility and resentment. Yeats's negative attitudes are less accessible. Yet the monumental indifference of his remark to Margaret Gough on Lady Gregory's death, that it would be Coole and its trappings that he would regret, indicates that Lady Gregory's antagonism had its counterpart. His love for Maud Gonne was fraught with fear, anger, disgust, the underside of an idealising romantic passion. Lady Gregory recorded in her diary for 1897-8 many belittling judgements by Yeats of Maud Go nne, includ• ing the pronouncement that she might be "locked up as mad" if it were Editor's Introduction XXI known that her political work was directed by visions - a remarkable specimen of a metaphysical double standard. Even with Olivia Shake• spear, who was unusually forbearing and unegotistical, there were areas of profound unhappiness. He remained unable to present her with a text of the poems from The Wind Among the Reeds until 1910, the time of their second affair. "After Long Silence" uncovers the sup• pressions and lacunae in their continuing intimacy. The friendship with Florence Farr seems ostensibly less troubled; the affair of 1903-5 apparently produced no resentments, probably because of Florence Farr's lack of any sense of sexual or emotional exclusivity. Yet in her diary she recorded her conviction that she had wasted her time with both Yeats and Shaw. George Yeats was to say that Yeats had despised Florence Farr's intellect, an assessment confirmed by The Trembling of the Veil. The evidence of Florence Farr's correspondence from Ceylon is that, although she remained fond of Yeats, her confidence was reserved for Shaw, who was told the full story of her illness, without euphemism or gloss. The influence of Lady Gregory on Yeats obviously waned when he married. George Yeats's mediumship became a kind of authority which overrode even that moulding friendship. With his wife he had under• gone a transfiguring emotional experience comparable in scale to the first meeting with Maud Gonne: ''I heard her voice, 'Turn that I may expound I What's bowed your shoulder and ntade pale your cheek."' That "midnight voice" of mediumship is described in terms that make clear Yeats's sense of primary dependence upon his wife's gift - "to age what milk is to a child". When George's mediumship came to an end, Yeats entered a phase of compensatory pseudo-adolescence, his "second puberty". This was characterised by a series of, at times, near-farcical relationships with a heterogeneous succession of women: Dolly Robinson, Margot Ruddock, Dorothy Wellesley, Ethel Mannin and finally Edith Shackleton Heald. On the theoretical level this "second puberty" was augmented by a preoccupation with eugenics. On his deathbed Yeats was watched over by his wife and Edith Heald, but, as he acknowledged in a late letter, "the last kiss is given to the void".

DEIRDRE TOOMEY Acknowledgements

Our chief debt of gratitude is to Miss and Mr Michael B. Yeats for granting permission (through A. P. Watt Ltd) to use pub• lished and unpublished materials by W. B. Yeats in this volume. Unpublished materials are copyright Michael B. Yeats and Anne Yeats. Many of our contributors are further indebted to and Anne Yeats for making unpublished materials available for study and for many other kindnesses, as is the Editor. Other unpublished materials have been made available to us through the kindness of Dr Omar Pound. We are grateful to Colin Smythe Ltd on behalf of Catherine Kennedy and Anne de Winton for permission to use unpublished materials by Lady Gregory, and on behalf of Mrs Diarmuid Russell for permission to use materials from the unpublished work of George William Russell. Mr John Hunter allowed access to and quotation from the unpublished papers of Dorothea Hunter. The Society of Authors on behalf of the estate of George Bernard Shaw and Professor Dan H. Laurence allowed us to quote from Shaw's unpublished correspondence. A number of helpful librarians, including Catherine Fahy and B. McKenna of the National Library of Ireland, the late Dr Lola L. Szladits of the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, New York Public Library (Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations), Dr Cathy Henderson and Professor Thomas F. Staley at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, provided us with materials and research assistance. The British Library, the Uni• versity of London Library, and the library of Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, University of London, have also been invalu• able. Images reproduced in this volume have been provided through the generosity of Anna MacBride White and Professor A. NormanJeffares; John Hunter, a private collector; Josephine Johnson; Conrad A. Balliet; the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Texas; the Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University; the National Library xxu Acknowledgements XXlll of Ireland; and the National Gallery of Ireland. Roy Davies of Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, University of London, provided great assistance in preparing images for press. We continue to be grateful to Miss Riette Sturge Moore and the Trustees of the Sturge Moore estate for permission to use on the front board a symbol adapted from Thomas Sturge Moore's designs for the H. P.R. Finberg transla• tion of Axil ( 1925). Linda Shaughnessy of A. P. Watt and Son, Professor Roy Foster, FBA, ofBirkbeck College, University of London, and Dr John Kelly of StJohn's College, Oxford, on behalf of Oxford University Press, were generous with permissions. At Macmillan, Margaret Cannon and Tim Farmiloe were particularly helpful during the preparation of this volume. Members of the Advisory Board read a very large number of submissions for this number, and we are grateful both to them and to Professor Roy Foster, Dr Omar Pound, Professor Martin Dodsworth, Harry Cockerham, R. A. Gilbert, Pamela Bickley and David Ward. For a number of years the late Graham Eyre as copy-editor en• hanced the Yeats Annual, and we remember his work with great admira• tion.

DEIRDRE TOOMEY