Worse, so was George, whom he loved despite her devotion. Bullets spattered the windows of their grand house in Dublin. George played it cool, just as she did in his last phase when monkey-gland injections helped harden — if that’s the word we want — his perennial conviction that wisdom was to be found under the storm-tossed banner of a woman’s beauty. He was already in his dotage when he found himself between the sheets with a 27-year old stunner called Margaret Ruddock. He cast her horoscope, which failed to tell him that she was not only giftless but psycho. She ended up in the bin. Other mistresses gathered around his death-bed, where George kindly marshalled the traffic. She forgave both them and him that he had written immortal poems so often to them, and so seldom to her. But that was what they were for: to be wild swans, to flood the everyday with the unknown, to ready him for Byzantium.

This book will be essential to Yeats scholarship, but ever since Professor Donoghue, following Dr Leavis, decided that Yeats’s poetry needed too much explanation, the burning question has been about how essential the scholarship is. If it keeps young students from some of the greatest poetry ever written, then the answer is easy: about as essential as a suit of armour to Ian Thorpe.

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