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.