'What then? sang Plato’s ghost.’ Editors Lauren Arrington and Matthew Campbell begin their Preface to the massive Oxford Handbook of W.B. Yeats with the poet’s own injunction to old age. And what a life it was: seventy-three years lived over two world wars; a mammoth literary oeuvre criss-crossing Victorian melancholy, Romantic sublimity, and Modernist apocalypse. At different times and sometimes simultaneously, Yeats was a bohemian raconteur in the Cheshire Cheese pub, a radical nationalist leader of the Irish Revival, a cosmopolitan disciple of the occult, and a waspish senator enraged by the philistinism of the Irish Free State.
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