Nothing more accurately mirrors the changing tides of Yeats' life than do his love poems, from the youthful verses inspired by Maud Gonne to the Testimony of Later Years written beside the flooded lake at Coole. These verses chart his dreams and devotions, moods of ecstasy and despair, moments of sensuality and disillusion. In his introduction, Professor A. Norman Jeffares, sets the love poetry into the framework of Yeats' life. He explores the influences that shaped the verses, the friends and lovers who provoked such feeling and the arts and the cults that influenced his thoughts.; Professor Jeffares is a widely recognised authority on the life and work of Yeats. His biography W.B. Yeats: Man and Poet has only recently been superseded by his W.B. Yeats: A New Biography.