He was Ireland’s master poet, forever chasing transcendence and formal perfection. She was its fiery revolutionary, gambling her reputation on the dream of national freedom. Their mutual devotion to art, to occult practice, and to Irish liberty formed a decades-long creative pact that reshaped them both and still reverberates today.

A Crowd of Stars draws you into this volatile intersection of passion, poetry, and politics, framed by the intimate Gonne poems, and paired with commentary from Maud Gonne herself--letting the Muse speak back to the art she inspired. While much has been written about Yeats and Gonne, not least by themselves, no-one has brought all the Gonne poems together in one volume before, or conveyed the mutually-generative nature of their bond.

The clarity of Gonne's commentary exposes Yeats’s tale of unrequited love as a fiction. In truth, their relationship embraced friendship, erotic intrigue, a self-styled 'spiritual marriage,' and a series of bruising betrayals on both sides. This friction kindled over eighty published poems and some still-unpublished drafts on his side, while on hers it powered a lifetime of audacious political campaigns.

Blending literary history with modern psychology, A Crowd of Stars gets behind the smiling public images to expose how two mother-shadowed, father-scarred creators transmuted personal heartache into myth, magic, and revolutionary politics—leaving a constellation of poems that still blaze, and a feminist political legacy that has yet to be understood and acted upon.