Can Professor Jeffares's book realty be close on half a century old already? In fact, it was published first in 1949 and so is within three years of being fifty - a relatively long life as literary biographies go. Much more to the point, it remains almost certainly the best book written about the poet, though admittedly most of the literature about Yeats is curiously uninspiring and unmemorable.
Jeffares's interpretation of the poet's life and mentality has become the standard one, the one which most of us grew up with and absorbed, and on which all Yeats commentators since then appear to lean heavily. This is the third edition, and according to the foreword it includes some "minor corrections in the light of fresh evidence," but Jeffares has seen no need to rewrite the text substantially. The shy, socially gauche, impoverished youth of the 1880s travelled a long way socially, intellectually and emotionally before being transformed into the self assured, ceremonious Nobel Prize winner who charmed the Swedish royal family by displaying the manners of a courtier". Yeats virtually remade himself in middle age, both as a writer and as a personality, and he was a man of great will power and a good deal of worldly astuteness, who handled and shaped his career with prudence and foresight and, in his own circumlocuitous way, understood the value of what today we would call public relations. Women played a paramount role in his life Maud Gonne as the unattainable muse and inspirer, Lady Gregory as a kind of foster mother, his wife as the guarantor of his emotional peace and privacy; and there were also the liaisons with Olivia Shakespear, Florence Farr, Mabel Dickinson.
There are still a few, very minor errors here and there for instance, the composer Antheil's name is misspelt as "Anthiel".