‘What then? sang Plato’s ghost.’ Editors Lauren Arrington and Matthew Campbell begin their Preface to the massive Oxford Handbook of W.B. Yeats with the poet’s own injunction to old age. And what a life it was: seventy-three years lived over two world wars; a mammoth literary oeuvre criss-crossing Victorian melancholy, Romantic sublimity, and Modernist apocalypse. At different times and sometimes simultaneously, Yeats was a bohemian raconteur in the Cheshire Cheese pub, a radical nationalist leader of the Irish Revival, a cosmopolitan disciple of the occult, and a waspish senator enraged by the philistinism of the Irish Free State.

In 1939, T.S. Eliot famously declared that Yeats was ‘one of those few whose history is the history of their own time, who are a part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them'. Academics were quick to oblige. Since the pioneering monograph by Belfast poet Louis MacNeice in 1941, followed by volumes from towering mid-twentieth century American critics like Richard Ellman and Hugh Kenner, the academic sub-industry devoted to extending Yeats’s legacy has been busy. This new reference collection, published by Oxford University Press in the Yeats Nobel centenary year and featuring forty-two erudite essays by scholars from across the globe (none of them Australian), comes in at more than seven hundred pages. It is a weighty reminder that the relationship between Yeats and academic literary studies may be inexhaustibly generative.

Lurking in the background of any academic reference collection which claims to bring together new perspectives and establish new dialogues, however, are the ghosts of intellectual history. This is especially so in the case of a major (and majorly studied) poet like Yeats. Two episodes of this history seem particularly relevant to understanding the merits and perhaps some of the limitations of this new volume.