Alfred Perceval Graves Poems of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

Annotation

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. When in the year 1880 I wrote a memoir of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, as a Preface to his Purcell Papers, published by Bentley and Son, I was not aware that, besides being the author of the Irish poems contained in that collection of Irish stories and of the celebrated Shamus O'Brien, Le Fanu had anonymously contributed half-a-dozen other poems to the Dublin University Magazine between the years 1863 and 1866; two of which, The Legend of the Glaive, and Beatrice, exhibit Le Fanu's genius in a new and unexpected light. They show him to have been capable of dramatic and lyrical creation on a distinctly higher plane than he had hitherto reached, although the forms in which the drama and the legend are cast are clearly experimental and not always successful.