Yeats: The Man and the Masks

Yeat's life was one of the most complex of all the poets' in its outer and inner events. Mystical concerns - involvement with spiritualism, construction of a transcendental world system in A Vision - fitted among and around an unusually active involvement in public affairs, as a founder of the Abbey Theatre and as a senator of the new Irish Free State.The most influential poet of his age, Yeats eluded the grasp of many who sought to explain him. In this classic critical examination of the poet, Richard Ellmann strips away the masks of his subject: occultist, senator of the Irish Free State, libidinous old man, and Nobel Prize winner. National Book Award-winning biographer Richard Ellmann was the author of the landmark biographies James Joyce and Oscar Wilde, among many other highly praised works.