Yeats – the man and the masks

THIS book is based on recently published materials and in part on some 10,000 pages of unpublished manuscripts by W. B. Yeats which Mrs. Yeats, undoubtedly in her generosity, permitted me to examine in Dublin. The manuscripts include autobiographical notes, drafts of poems, letters, diaries, and other papers. I am indebted to the Rockefeller Foundation for a Post-War Fellowship in the Humanities which enabled me to spend thirteen months in Ireland and England. I have had the privilege, too, of talking with many of Yeats’s friends, acquaintances, and relations, and among these I must mention my special gratitude to Frank O’Connor for constant help, to Seán O’Casey for an interview, to W. B. Yeats and Lily Yeats for their reminiscences, and to the late T. W. Rolleston, Clifford Bax, Professor Thomas Bodkin, Professor C. M. Bowers, Austin Clarke, Sir Sydney Cockerell, C. P. Curran, Edmund Dulac and Mrs. Dulac (Helen Beauclerk), T. S. Eliot, Norman Haire, Edith Shackleton Heald, Joseph Hone, Madame Maud Gonne MacBride, Sir Basil Noel-Buxton, H. M. Magee, W. K. Magee (‘John Eglinton’), Ethel Mannin, John Masefield, Mrs. T. Sturge Moore, Professor Gilbert Murray, P. S. O’Hegarty, Lady Elizabeth Pelham, Dr. Donald Cormell, Osbert Sitwell, John Sparrow, Dr. James Starkey (‘Seumas O’Sullivan’), Lennox Robinson, Dr. Ruth C. Stauffer, Stuart, Ninnette de Valois, Allan Wade, Ernest Walsh, and the Duchess of Wellington (Dorothy Wellesley). Norman Holmes Pearson, then my commanding officer in the Office of Strategic Services in London, made it possible for me to go for the first time to Dublin in 1941. Peter Allt, Gerard Fay, Ellsworth Mason, and Roger Manvell have also put me under obligations. Diarmuid Russell has kindly permitted me to quote from some unpublished letters of his father.