Books: 1865-1939

W. B. YEATS—Joseph Hone—MacMillan ($4).

The late great William Butler Yeats was a poet of genius, a man of parts (of which few sold at popular prices), a deep-sea diver in the lugubrious pearl-gulfs of the occult, a political thinker to set men's teeth on edge.

This official biography, by the Dublin scholar Joseph Hone, is not by a good deal as great as its subject. Its polished-walnut elegance gives way now to dullness, now to Irish fanciness; its irony and its tact might occasionally have given way to blunter judgment. It goes into...

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