On January 18, 1914, seven male poets gathered to eat a peacock. W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound, the celebrities of the group, led four lesser-known poets to the Sussex manor house of the man they were honouring, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt: the poet, horse-breeder, Arabist, and anti-imperialist married to Byron's only granddaughter. In this story of the curious occasion that came to be known as the 'peacock dinner,' immortalized in the famous photograph of the poets standing in a row, Lucy McDiarmid creates a new kind of literary history derived from intimacies rather than 'isms.' The dinner evolved from three close literary friendships, those between Pound and Yeats, Yeats and Lady Gregory, and Lady Gregory and 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 Through close readings of unpublished letters, diaries, memoirs, and poems, in an argument at all times theoretically informed, McDiarmid reveals the way marriage and adultery, as well as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. Like the women who are absent from the photograph, the poets at its edges (F.S. Flint, Richard Aldington, Sturge Moore, and Victor Plarr) are also brought into the discussion, adding interest by their very marginality. This is literary history told with considerable style and brio, often comically aware of the extraordinary alliances and rivalries of the 'seven male poets' but attuned to significant issues in coterie formation, literary homosociality, and the development of modernist poetics from late-Victorian and Georgian beginnings. ^lPoets and the Peacock Dinner is written with critical sophistication and a wit and lightness that never compromise on the rich texture of event and personality.

About the Author
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. Her scholarly interest in cultural politics, especially quirky, colourful, suggestive episodes, is exemplified by her most recent book, The Irish Art of Controversy, as well as by Poets and the Peacock Dinner. She is also a former president of the American Conference for Irish Studies.

Reviews
This short, but densely packed, biography of a literary meal and a literary occasion is fascinating. It will appeal to those interested in the movement of poetry across periods as McDiarmid weaves together the Victorians and Modernists, while supplying more than a gesturing nod to their Romantic predecessors. * Joanne Ella Parsons, Irish Studies Review *



Book Information
ISBN 9780198788331
Author Lucy McDiarmid
Format Paperback
Page Count 240
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 298g
Dimensions(mm) 215mm * 137mm * 13mm