Lucy McDiarmid launches Poets and the Peacock Dinner: The Literary History of a Meal

100 years after W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and five other male poets gathered to eat a peacock, Lucy McDiarmid of Montclair State University explores the meal’s far-reaching implications through literary history, biography, and cultural theory in Poets and the Peacock Dinner: The Literary History of a Meal (Oxford University Press).

The volume will be launched by poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, one of Ireland’s foremost poet writing in the Irish language and a major influence in revitalizing the Irish language in modern poetry.

The dinner evolved from three close literary friendships, those between Pound and Yeats, Yeats and Lady Gregory, and Lady Gregory and Wilfred Scawen Blunt, whose romantic affair thirty years earlier was unknown to the others. Through close readings of unpublished letters, diaries, memoirs, and poems, in an argument at all times theoretically informed, McDiarmid reveals the way marriage and adultery, as well as friendship, offer ways of transmitting the professional culture of poetry.

Lucy McDiarmid is Marie Frazee-Baldassarre Professor of English at Montclair State University. The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, she is the author or editor of five previous books including The Irish Art of Controversy and is a former president of the American Conference for Irish Studies.

Introduction by Prof. John Waters, Glucksman Ireland House NYU.

Prof. Lucy McDiarmid will also be speaking at Glucksman Ireland House NYU on Saturday, April 11th as part of the Taste of the Yeats Summer School.