ABSTRACT
Romantic Image was written in the summer of 1955. It was virtually unplanned; I was trying to write something quite different when the idea for this book lodged itself in my head, already, it seemed, in a pretty advanced state of development, and the labour preceding its birth was the least painful I have ever suffered. It would be hard to say why this was so. Certainly I was indebted to the conversation of learned and sprightly colleagues who had an informed interest in the ‘decadent’ literature of the late Victorian era. And I had a long-standing interest in Yeats. In the late winter or early spring of 1955 I had been asked to take part in a series of public lectures, each about a single poem, and I chose ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’. This lecture, as it turned out, was the germ of the book.
