Blood Kindred: W.B. Yeats, The Life, The Death, The Politics By WJ McCormack Pimlico, st£12.99

Blood Kindred: W.B. Yeats, The Life, The Death, The Politics By WJ McCormack Pimlico, st£12.99

Eugene O'Brien In a recent conversation with Seamus Heaney, I made the point that after Roy Foster's monumental biography of Yeats, any further efforts at biography had been well and truly silenced. The advent of Bill McCormack's book, Blood Kindred, made me think again.

This political biography of Yeats examines, as its title outlines, specific aspects of the life of the apprentice mage and arch-poet in a style and manner which make this book compulsive reading. The premise is either intriguing or off the wall, depending on one's point of view. McCormack takes one of Yeats's occult notions, namely that after death the soul still sees itself surrounded by familiar objects and people, and uses this as an organising device for this biography: "what former associates and 'Blood Kindred' did the soul of Yeats see when released from the body in 1939"?

He argues this case well throughout the book, and the blood imagery of the title ties in neatly with the discussions of ancestry, family and fascist politics with which the book is concerned. He gives us Yeats obsessed with family and with Victorian connections. But mostly he focuses on Yeats's fascism and highlights a number of factors which have been glossed over by other biographers.

He details Yeats's letter of thanks to Freidrich Krebs, Oberburgmeister of Frankfurt, acknowledging receipt of an award in 1934, his public approval of Nazi legislation depriving Jews of their property in 1938, and aspects of his anti-Semitism. He contextualises these in terms of the prevailing attitudes among middle- and upper-class Europeans of the time and paints a complex picture of the political Yeats.

He does the same in terms of Yeats's engagement in the Roger Casement issue. McCormack is careful not to oversimplify: Yeats may have been guilty of pro-German leanings but these leanings were encouraged by the IRB milieu surrounding him, including the Gonnes, mother and daughter, and Francis Stuart. In terms of anti-Semitism, modernism as a movement was hardly distinguished by its toleration of the Jews.

In closing remarks McCormack puts it well, referring to Foster's view that attempts to see the Frankfurt episode as indicative of Yeats as a fellow traveller have been refuted. McCormack adds that in his view, a fellow traveller is precisely what Yeats was: "on occasion. He did not travel early, and he did not travel often" but he "gave comfort to democracy's enemies, to decency's enemies".

Well-argued, comprehensively referenced and full of stylistic brio, this work presents some genuinely new aspects of Yeats's life and work. McCormack's style is direct, conversational, at times waspish ("Mr O'Connor has written a biography of Yeats's friend, Oliver St John Gogarty unspoiled by that medical gentleman's anti-Semitism") but always coherent.

He knows his Yeats, and the book is shot through with Yeatsian in-jokes - "chalk from cheshire cheese" (a reference to a line from Responsibilities) - academics not being noted for their humour!

As an example in the use of secondary sources to reinforce an argument, this could well be a set text. He gives due credit to contrary opinions but is unswerving in his own argument and points out gaps and errors in the work of others, using these to bolster his own views.

Whereas Foster moves across a broad front, hoovering up all aspects of the life of Yeats, and setting them out chronologically, McCormack is more like a drill or auger, focusing on a particular strand and tracing this through the life and work. Blood Kindred takes its place among the literature of Yeats. It is valuable for the light it sheds on its subject but also for its own style and engagement.

Eugene O'Brien, is Head of the Department of English in Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick and editor of The Irish Book Review magazine.