Ten years ago I stopped reading books on Yeats because they just weren't adding anything new. But a friend recommended this book (the title intrigued me as well). And I ended up reading this one through to the end. What a fresh voice, what a fresh reading of Yeats! The theory is here, but it is made real and useful. The scholarship is here (no one I have ever read knows Yeats' complex mystical world better), but it is shaped into a captivating and human reading of his poetry. The interest in gender is here, but it is not turned into the battlecry or the chauvenism of the feminists. Above all, the close reading of Yeats texts (plays and poems) is here, but it is always new, clear, well grounded, and sensible. The book applies a wealth of new material from George and Georgie's spiritual seances, and it is unexpected and astonishing how it changes--for the better!--our reading of classic Yeats works. This is what literary criticism should be.