The history of English song from the late nineteenth century to the Second World War.

This book tells the story of Irish poetry in English, from the union of Ireland and Great Britain in 1801 to the Irish Free State in 1921 and beyond. It offers both a literary history of nineteenth-century Irish poetry and a way of reading it for scholars of Irish studies as well as Romantic and Victorian literature.

This book not only introduces the reader to contemporary themes in Yeats criticism, but also provides a unified interpretation based on Yeats' ambivalent sense of identity as a nationalist conscious of the Anglo-Irish tradition from which he claimed descent.