The recent issue of estudios irlandeses, the Spanish Journal of Irish Studies, includes my article which was prompted by a review by the Scottish poet, Robert Crawford, of Clare Bucknell’s recent book, "The Treasuries: Poetry Anthologies and the Making of British Culture" (2003). My essay provides a reading of Bucknell’s book in the light of other anthologies. So it is not in itself a review but, rather, a series of reflections on the construction and nature of anthologies stimulated by my reading of Bucknell’s book. Crawford insists on the omissions in Bucknell’s account from a Scottish perspective. But I want to take in a wider perspective, one that includes national identity. Initially, I focus on the index and on the entry for Palgrave’s father and his Jewish name. This leads to a discussion on the authoritative look of The Golden Treasury and perhaps on what it is hiding. The essay takes issue with the partial view of English poetry, where Wordsworth is afforded the most poems, and eighteenth-century poets hardly feature. The second half discusses Bucknell’s chapter on the popularity of poetry therapy and her omission of any discussion of recent women’s poetry. The anthology she dismisses is Yeats’s The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892-1935, a conclusion which invites a response at some length. The focus then shifts to another Irish writer, William Allingham, and his largely forgotten anthology, Nightingale Valley, which was published the year before The Golden Treasury and which Palgrave sought to better. In his thought-provoking choices, which includes possibly the first printing of Blake’s poems in an anthology, Allingham provides a counter to those who read poetry and literature simply in terms of the way it reflects history. In doing so he affords a valuable critique of The Treasuries and The Golden Treasury from over a century and a half ago.

"Yeats Revisited: The Continuing Legacy" is the title of my latest book. I wrote it during the pandemic in part as a reminder that nothing should be forgotten that once occupied the mind or held sway. After several intensive decades concentrating on Joyce and Irish writing, I here return to Yeats and discover in the process I have a stronger sympathy today for the poet than in the past. This alteration finds particular expression in a long chapter devoted to one of his favourite poems, ‘Among School Children’. The poem deserves a lot of affection and close attention, and I spend time discussing what is inside and what is outside the poem. Every year when I taught it in my room at Gray’s Court overlooking the walls of the ancient city of York, I would devote a whole seminar to ‘Among School Children’. Those particular classes rarely failed to engage my students. Yeats, I believe, rightly continues to hold our attention, and, although he is not a modernist in the way Eliot and Pound are, he does share their terrain. By way of conclusion to my final chapter on the poet and modernism, I suggest Yeats is an enigma, modernism’s outlier, an honoured guest who refused the invitation.

My previous book, which I have called James Joyce’s Portrait: A New Reading, took me the best part of 2018 to write and longer than I had anticipated. When John Spiers asked me to consider such a book for Edward Everett Root I responded immediately, thinking it would be a project of manageable size. The organisation of the material took time to get right, for I wanted something that was readable for a younger generation of students in particular without being overbearing or another guide book to Joyce’s novel. Eventually, the chapters emerged in an order which satisfied me. And looking back I can now see what drove me to alight on certain themes and concerns. When complete, I added the selection of images to enhance the reading experience. If Joyce’s novel is primarily about anything, it is writing, and this is a cue to my present study. It is supplemented by the question that never seems to go away. Who wrote the novel: a character we know as Stephen Dedalus or an author known throughout the world as James Joyce?

My other book with Edward Everett Root is "The Joyce Country: Literary Scholarship and Irish Culture", which is now available in paperback. This is a collection of essays and reviews on Joyce and other Irish writers.

Now retired, I live in York in the UK where I have lived for nearly 45 years, well over half my life. I write about aspects of my life in various books but, until The Long Apprenticeship: A Writer's Memoir, published in spring 2012, I haven't written an autobiography as such. I began publishing with my wife Mary Eagleton in a critical study of English fiction and social class (1979), but most of my publishing career has been taken up with books on Irish writing and in particular Yeats and Joyce. I spent five enjoyable years in the last decade as literary reviews editor for a Spanish Irish studies internet journal. I still do some reviewing and keep in touch with former students and friends round the world, but I haven't embarked on any major critical project since Reading Joyce (2008). That isn't strictly true because the memoir I have just completed includes a fulll bibliography, and I deliberately set my own book within a western tradition of memoir-writing. A memoir is like an underground stream which comes to the surface. I enjoyed writing it even if it forced me into a partial retreat from the world for the best part of two years. I continue to read widely, mostly in literature, and am constantly surprised by new authors and older material. Authors who die young must have missed out on so much that shelters under the term 'Literature'.