ABSTRACT
The magazine had received ‘Adam's Curse’ more than a month earlier, for WBY's agent A.P. Watt had sent the poem to its editor Henry Newbolt on 10 Oct. It was on that occasion Kathleen remarked that it was hard work being beautiful, which Willie turned into his poem Adam's Curse. It is impossible to say with any certainty when the after-dinner conversation remembered by MG took place; it is conceivable, in fact, that the recollection itself was shaped in significant ways by MG's reading of the poem. In the earlier years of its reception, ‘Adam's Curse’ was not so generally seen as pivotal, or even as potentially so. It is important that the speaker is cast as male, and as a poet, but the two women in the poem, one a contributor to the conversation and the other completely silent, though addressed, deepen and confirm the speaker's preoccupations and convictions on the topic of beauty and hard work.
