Lucy McDiarmid

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Lucy McDiarmid is a scholar and writer. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University and is currently Marie Frazee-Baldassarre Professor of English at Montclair State University. Her scholarly interest in cultural politics, especially quirky, colorful, suggestive episodes, is exemplified by The Irish Art of Controversy (2005) and her most recent book, Poets and the Peacock Dinner: The Literary History of a Meal (2014). She is a former fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation and of the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

Her forthcoming book At Home in the Revolution: What Women Said and Did in 1916 will be published by the Royal Irish Academy (Dublin) in autumn 2015.

Advance Praise

The occasion in January 1914 when seven poets headed by Yeats and Pound sat down to a dinner of peacock in honour of the ageing poet and public agitator Wilfid Scawen Blunt is a key moment in literary history. Or so it emerges in Lucy McDiarmid's brilliant exploration of the event. With her extraordinary flair for imaginative scholarship, she illuminates the origins and precedents for the peacock dinner, the offstage role of Lady Gregory, Yeats's close friend and Blunt's former lover, in organising this all-male gathering, the rivalries and alliances in those invited and excluded, and its long-term significance in terms of the genealogies of poetic modernism. Whatever the roast peacock tasted like, this is a book to be savoured and enjoyed.

Nicholas Grene, Professor of English Literature, Trinity College Dublin.