Magic

This chapter demonstrates that W. B. Yeats was the single most important literary influence on John McGahern. It takes particular interest in McGahern’s unpublished first novel, ‘The End or the Beginning of Love’ and begins to show how and why McGahern took steps to reduce some of the more obvious borrowings from a Yeatsian aesthetic. Of McGahern’s published novels it pays closest attention to The Leavetaking in which Yeats is quoted directly and in which his great poem ’Among School Children’ plays a hidden and intriguing part.