A poet under strict controls

This vast work has the distinction of being both unreadable and unputdownable. It consists of nearly half a million words, a mountain of unsifted facts – who was whose cousin and what otherwise irrelevant uncle died in South Africa – which make you clutch your brow, tempt you to skip and thereby to run the risk of missing something revealing, amusing, germane. Perhaps these bits should have been printed in different type. Not a mountain, perhaps, a quarry for future Yeats scholars. However, these – a last complaint – will not be helped by the index: under ‘astrology’, for example, there are no less than 150 page references but no indication at all what occasion, or aspect of astrology, the pages mention; as an index, therefore, it is useless.

Buried inside this mass is an account of the background, childhood, youth, married life and widowhood of George Hyde Lees. She was the 25-year-old upper-class, South Kensington Englishwoman whom W. B. Yeats suddenly and startlingly married in 1917 when he was 52 and, it seems, in love with somebody else, Iseult, the daughter of an unrequited love he had for 20 years memorably broadcast to the world, Maud Gonne.

It is a story difficult not to make sound absurd (and is told simply, with sympathy, by Brenda Maddox in George’s Ghosts, 1999). Absurd or not, out of this marriage, in incredible circumstances, came some of the finest lyric poems of the 20th century.

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Pre- and post-first world war there seems to have been a fashionable mania for ‘the spirit world’ – sZances, table-rapping and so forth. George – at that time ‘Georgie’ – otherwise conventional, made herself a genuine scholar of such matters, expert in astrology, horoscopes, ‘horaries’ (predictions).