NO SECOND TROY. A beautiful poem of thwarted passion in which W. B. Yeats looks back on years of unrequited love and assesses the Irish people's relationship to his own object of oft-spurned affection, Maude Gonne. The lecture gives the background on Yeats, Gonne, and the Ireland of the time when the poem was composed. "No Second Troy" is a marvelous work in its own right, and begs comparison with Yeats's later poem, "Easter 1916", a poem written after the "ignorant men" Yeats so decries here have done exactly what he least expected them to do.
Andrew Barker

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