Acknowledgments
The first debt is to the legion of dedicated critics and scholars who have illuminated virtually every aspect of Yeats’s life, thought, and poetry. I have more personal debts to friends: Gordon Boudreau, Barron Boyd, Warren and Susan Cheesman, John Cooke, Elizabeth Costello, Kate Costello-Sullivan, Dan Dowd, Helen Edelman, Laura Faul, Julie Grossman, Maureen Hanratty, Paul Johnston, David Lloyd, Roger Lund, Alicia Mathias, Don and Judy McCormack, Tracie Meisel, Julie Olin-Ammentorp, Tom Parker, John Rigney, Ann Ryan, Jonathan Schonsheck, Linda Schwartzberg, Bruce Shefrin, and Eleanor Souls.
The list of teachers and scholars who encouraged me along the way begins with Elizabeth Sewell, a visiting scholar from Oxford who praised an undergraduate essay on Keats I’d written at Fordham. W. Jackson Bate and John Unterecker both took the time to respond at length to letters and poems I inflicted on them back when I was in the army. At NYU, I found champions in Mack Rosenthal, David Erdman, and Conor Cruise O’Brien (then visiting Schweitzer Professor) who evolved from helpers to friends. Later, my work was amicably supported by transatlantic Romanticists Richard Gravil and Richard A. Brantley.
At the Yeats International Summer School, first as student, then as lecturer, I was encouraged by directors from T. R. Henn to John Kelly to Gus Martin (who once broke up a fist fight I was about to have with John Montague) to Ron Schuchard. During those years I was also helped by Northrop Frye, Erich Heller, M. H. Abrams, Richard Ellmann, and George Mills Harper. At Skidmore, I benefited from the friendship of Tom Lewis and the constant support of Bob Boyers, founder-editor of Salmagundi. Later friends and mentors have included three major critics, Harold Bloom (to whom the book is dedicated), Denis Donoghue, and Helen Vendler. My most recent debts are multiple. First, to Canadian novelist and critic Douglas Glover, who invited me to contribute to his splendid online magazine, Numéro Cinc, where some ideas presented here were test-run. Second and third, to Joe Hassett and Jay Rogoff, who kindly read portions of the manuscript; fourth to Warwick Gould, who corrected my initial confusion of the two figures who share the name Valentinus. Fifth, I’d like to thank the OBP team: Alison Gray, Anna Gatti, Melissa Purkiss and Alessandra Tosi. Sixth and finally, to Sandra Clarke, my cherished companion during the writing of this book and the ongoing COVID crisis.
This Muse-shadowed volume, dedicated to Harold Bloom, would have been, were it not for the discourtesy of death, dedicated to Helen Vendler, who read one entire version of the manuscript with her usual critical acumen and unrivaled love and knowledge of lyric poetry. Or to more intimate Muses in my life. I started to carry out the latter plan, a dedication prefaced by Yeats’s ‘Now must I these three praise—/ Three women that have wrought/ What joy is in my days,’ only to realize that there were, inconveniently, four women.
But there is more than one way to be smitten. Along with many others of my generation, I have had a distant but cherished Muse for more than half a century: a woman whose face and eyes and incomparable voice I have long loved, and whose philosophy of life, political sanity, delight in books, sense of humor, and courageous equanimity in confronting a cruel disease, I have come to admire. So here’s looking at you, Linda Ronstadt.