Shortly after the death of Algernon Swinburne in April 1909 Yeats announced to his sister that he was now 'King of the Cats'. Yet, as the letters in this volume demonstrate, although widely recognized as the leading poet in English, he was far less sure of himself than this triumphant boast suggests. Indeed, this volume tracks Yeats's unrelenting but often agonised attempts to redefine his positon as a poet in a time of aesthetic and personal transition anduncertainty, struggling, as he put it, to fashion 'an art of my own day' and amid 'doubtings, shrinkings, hatreds, reconciliations'. Developments in his personal life contributed to his sense ofuncertainty and transition over this period. In the spring of 1908 he began an affair with a new mistress, Mabel Dickinson, but ironically we find this rekindling and intensifying his feelings for his old love Maud Gonne, and for the first time they came close to a physical relationship. The Abbey Theatre also came under threat, when it seemed that the whole project might come to an end. For three years, as Yeats's correspondence eloquently reports, he worked tirelessly to make sure this didnot happen. His exertions in the Theatre were much increased by the terminal illness of his friend and colleague John Synge. The serious illness of Lady Gregory brought home to him his dependence on herand the ambience of her house, Coole Park; the massive mental breakdown of his companion Arthur Symons broke a remaining tie with the 1890s and the passing of his uncle and fellow occultist, George Pollexfen, severed his major link with Sligo. But, if these old relationships altered or disappeared, new ones were forged. Ezra Pound at last succeeded in meeting him, while Yeats himself fostered the talents of younger writers, notably the playwrights Lennox Robinson, T. C. Murray, St. JohnErvine, and Lord Dunsany. By the end of the period, Yeats, who we see brought to the edge of a nervous breakdown in 1909, and defying the Establishment in producing Shaw's Blanco Posnet, became a man ofaffairs.