“Copied without loss”: Michael Field’s Poetic Influence on the Work of W.B. Yeats with appendix: Yeats’s unpublished draft review of Field’s plays

Aunt and niece Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, two poets who lived and wrote under the pseudonym of Michael Field, have consistently been overlooked as influences on their own principal literary inheritor: William Butler Yeats. He was a great admirer of their poetry in his youth and continued to show serious critical engagement with their work throughout his career. In spite of Yeats’s connection to with Bradley and Cooper’s work and lives, hitherto no extensive critical study has been conducted regarding this relationship. The similarities in language, form, rhythms, and imagery between Field’s and Yeats’s adaptations of the mythic figures Deirdre and Leda demonstrate the former’s influence on the latter’s poetic style and themes.