Like R.F. Foster in W.B. Yeats: A Life, Canadian scholar Keith Alldritt concentrates on Yeats" public activities and relationships with others. (The poet"s interior struggles and creativity are amply considered in Yeats" memoirs and Richard Ellmann"s critical biography.) Alldritt"s succinct work covers his entire life in broad strokes and links Yeats to developments in Europe as well as Ireland. His Yeats is no dreamy mystic, but a "brawler and scrapper", an ambitious careerist preoccupied with status and money--very human and accessible to the general reader.