The Love Poems, edited with an introduction and notes by A. Norman Jeffares (London: Kyle Cathie, 1990) 146 pp.

Abstract

Love poetry was not a major preoccupation of the modernists. Nothing expresses Yeats’s ambivalent relation to the modernist enterprise better than his massive achievement in this genre, an achievement here collected, introduced and annotated by A. Norman Jeffares. As we know from his poem “The Scholars”, Yeats had a low opinion of the “bald heads forgetful of their sins” who were going to “edit and annotate” the lines he had “rhymed out in love’s despair”. He would, however, have appreciated the list of “Selling Points” that accompanied my copy of the volume. After targeting an audience of “Schools, colleges, academic establishments”, the publisher, with what is surely unconscious irony, adds a second category entirely distinct from the first: “Romantics and lovers of Yeats’s poetry”. The question of reception is crucial. Yeats wrote that “a poet is justified not by the expression of himself, but by the public he finds or creates”. His own public, according to sales figures compiled by George Bornstein, continued to buy Poems (1899) long after its author had embraced the aesthetic of modernism: this early volume, which includes numerous romantic love poems, is the only one of his collections for which he received substantial royalties. Contemporary scholarly opinion reverses the judgement of Yeats’s first readers, viewing the early verse as an interesting but inessential prelude to the monumental modernist volumes The Tower and The Winding Stair.