The acclaimed first volume of this definitive biography of W. B. Yeats left him in his fiftieth year, at a cross-roads in his life. The subsequent quarter-century surveyed in The Arch-Poet takes in his rediscovery of advanced nationalism and his struggle for an independent Irish culture, his continued pursuit of supernatural truths through occult experimentation, his extraordinary marriage, and a series of tumultuous love affairs. Throughout he was writing his greatest poems, from the stark simplicity of 'The Fisherman' and 'The Wild Swans at Coole', through the magnificent complexities of the sequences reflecting the Troubles and Civil War and the Byzantium poems, to the radical compression of his last work - some of it literally written on his deathbed. The drama of his life is mapped against the history of the Irish revolution and the new Irish state founded in 1922. Yeats's many political roles and his controversial involvement in a right-wing movement during the early 1930s are covered more closely than ever before, and his complex and passionate relationship with the developing history of his country remains a central theme. Throughout this book, the genesis, alteration, and presentation of his work (memoirs and polemic as well as poetry) is explored through his private and public life. The enormous and varied circle of Yeats's friends, lovers, family, collaborators, and antagonists inhabit and enrich a personal world of astounding energy, artistic commitment, and verve. Yeats constantly re-created himself and his work, believing that art was 'not the chief end of life but an accident in one's search for reality': a search which brought him again and again back to his governing preoccupations: sex and death. He also held that 'all knowledge is biography', a belief reflected in this study of one of the greatest lives of modern times.

此書深受英國文壇推崇，《衛報》的書評作者認為它將是我們這個時代最經典的一部文學傳記之一，既是學術作品，又有充滿想象力的創造，精妙的組織使其可讀性很強。《獨立報》評論此書：輕而易舉保持瞭一流傳記的極高水準。葉芝"愛爾蘭詩人"的身份幾乎貫穿瞭半個世紀，他寫下瞭大量傑齣的詩篇，此時的內戰與動亂也使其心緒不佳，將自己束縛於性和超自然體驗的雙股繩索下——其中包括與可愛的，"精神卻不大穩定"的Margot Ruddock 夫人存在的非正常關係。此外，本書也是《經濟學人》中年度推薦好書中的一本。