`From passion to platonism, from delight to despair, love poems are the most intense expression of the imagination. If they are matched with technical skills in deploying language then they are deeply memorable." So says Yeats scholar, Anglo-Irish literature expert and prolific editor, A. Norman Jeffares. The editor of "about half a dozen anthologies", his latest is a book of Irish love poems. A timely thought for the week that's in it, when at times it seems as if the nation is about to disappear in a sea of brash petunia-pink Valentine cards. "A good love poem is a beautiful, compressed piece of art," says Jeffares, warming to his theme.
"Its constraint is part of the appeal. There is no coasting along. That's why Shakespeare's sonnets are so marvellous. And Yeats, of course." Yeats, infinite in his capacity to chronicle the different moods of love, is an enduring favourite. Jeffares (known to his friends as Derry - the A. stands for Alexander) quotes easily: "Man is in love and loves what vanishes/What more is there to say": "There are hordes of excellent things in Yeats. I always come back to him with intense pleasure. What he writes is so true and so memorable." Jeffares's authoritative Yeats: Man and Poet has been in print for over 50 years, and he co-edited with Anna White the Gonne Yeats Letters: "I've done a lot of work on Yeats. I was lucky enough to have the run of his library and the help of his widow." He is currently working on The Letters of Iseult Gonne to W.B. Yeats with Christina Bridgwater and Anna White. Anna, who is Gonne's grand-daughter, is also writing Gonne's biography: "Anna has found out so much about the undercover politics of the period. It's going to be an impressive book when it's finished."
Yeats is an obvious choice for a book of love poems: "He is one of the great love poets. He moves from the romantic Celtic Twilight style to the adoration of the unattainable beauty. Then there is the opposite feeling when the object of his love, Maud Gonne, married another man and he had to accept they would never be together. He spearheaded a new kind of outspoken realism that appeared in the 1930s and 1940s.
The Free State was so puritanical, it was difficult for Irish poets to be direct about love. Yeats, in his directness, anticipated the freedom that came later and also echoed the frankness of the early Gaelic legends, where Grainne, Deirdre and Maeve all made advances to their men."
Some of Jeffares's choices are less obvious than Yeats: "Lady Gregory is usually seen as a stuffy old Victorian, but she wrote passionate love poems to Wilfrid Blunt, a great womaniser who, like many Englishmen, took up the Irish cause." Less well-known choices of the 1920s and 1930s include Rhoda Coghill and Blanaid Salkeld. Another favourite is Oliver St John Gogarty, whose poetry Jeffares is currently editing: "Gogarty wrote beautifully, cavalier poems rather like Herrick. At his best he's superb. Unfortunately he never bothered to polish much." He attributes Gogarty's lack of reknown to the attitude of American critics: "They took Joyce's mean and envious view of Gogarty. Gogarty's problem was that he tried to be nice to Joyce. Fatal!"
He is also keen on the great translators of poetry in Irish: "Samuel Ferguson is wonderful, of course, and then there's Robin Flower, Thomas Kinsella, Michael Hartnett and Frank O'Connor." He likes the "skill and musicality of Tom Moore, who is out of fashion now. But why shouldn't poetry sing?" He pays tribute to the blossoming of contemporary poetry by women such as Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, Eavan Boland and Maire Mac an tSaoi. He mentions two male contemporary poets who also impressed him: "Alfred Allen is a farmer in Cork who writes extraordinarily direct and moving love poetry, rather John Clare-ish. And Fergus Allen, who is published by Faber, is extremely sophisticated. Some of his poetry is based in places I know in Dublin, like Palmerston Park in Rathmines, which is near where I grew up in Milltown."
Jeffares admits to being "catholic in my taste". He reads Milton and Virgil "with pleasure" and has written extensively on poets as diverse as Swift and Whitman, as well as editing a book of Restoration Drama for the Folio Society. He has had a similarly wide-ranging career, which includes teaching in the Netherlands, Scotland and Australia. He spent 17 years teaching at Leeds University: "It was something of a golden age. Leeds had a wonderful number of post-grads then, including the wild and delightful Brendan Kennelly."
Now 79, he has long been out of the teaching scene, but has strong opinions about how it should be done: "You're there to find out how the students react, not to put ideas into them. A lot of critics like to create disciples." He regrets the current pressure on university lecturers to specialise within a narrow range, and to keep churning out publications: "It's difficult to retain your enthusiasm for your subject over time. You should be allowed to change your material every three years. And often the best teachers are those that publish the least amount." He finds modern criticism, on the whole, boring: "Too many long words and namedropping. The people who like all these theories don't seem to like the literature very much. I'm a simple old buffer. I try to convey my enthusiasm and help people to understand anything that's difficult."
He has an infectious good humour and, unusually for an academic, never takes himself too seriously. In this new anthology of love poetry he has made an effort to show that "love poetry doesn't have to be solemn". He is particularly keen on Paul Durcan for this reason: "He is very funny."
He can just as easily chat about the Irish literary tradition with authority and accessibility (he is author of A Pocket History of Irish Literature and The Irish Literary Movement): "The Gaelic poets had to complete a long period of training to perfect their technical skills. This inheritance blended with the Norman tradition of amour courtois. The result of our troubled history is that the imagination has flourished under the combination of these different traditions, creating a very individual poetry." Jeffares is a Norman name and his family is from Wexford, but he is three-quarters Scots, which partly explains his decision to retire in Fife Ness in Scotland (he also spent his last teaching years at Stirling University).
Retirement is a relative term in his case, however, given his impressive output: "It would be death not to do anything. Besides, I'm a very lazy person really." Yet in the same breath he speaks of a book of anecdotes he is writing, and his third volume of poetry. He responds with a hearty guffaw when I ask him why he continues to produce anthologies: "It's a disease". But really? And here comes another gem: "Working on an anthology is like going into a well-stocked garden. You pick the flowers you like, to decorate the different rooms of your mind."
Ireland's Love Poems, edited and with an introduction by A. Norman Jeffares, will be published by Kyle Cathie in March.