Excerpt from W. B. Yeats This book was written at a time when Yeats' writings were out of print. It therefore seemed useful to quote very freely from both his published and unpublished work. But the book was also written in order to present a view of the relationship between Yeats' life and his work which might help the reader to understand some poems better, to see the interrelationships between work written at different periods of Yeats' life, and to see something of how Yeats himself thought about his life and his poetry. Preparing this edition has made me realise how much con siderations of space had forced me to omit from my original but, since 1949, there have been several specialised studies which deal with many of the topics which had to be handled brie?y Yeats' symbolism, his interest in the occult, the sources of his visual imagery, his role in public life, his thought and detailed criticism of his poetry. Despite the publication of these other studies of Yeats (to which I have added myself) some of the contents of this book are still un obtainable elsewhere and I believe that its attempt to keep the reader's attention on the poet's writings rather than the critic's has some value  for Yeats' own comments are illuminating, and the conjunction between his prose and verse is rewarding in the extreme as revealing some of the individualism of a great poet.
Author
Alexander Norman Jeffares, AM was an Irish literary scholar. Jeffares was educated at Dublin High School, Trinity College, Dublin and Oriel College, Oxford. He took up his first academic appointment at the University of Groningen in 1947 and then moved to the University of Edinburgh in 1948. At the very early age of 30 he was then appointed to the Jury Chair of English at the University of Adelaide where he stayed for 17 years. He then returned to the Chair of English at the University of Leeds before finally moving to the University of Stirling in 1974. He retired as Emeritus Professor of English in 1985.
