Daniel Albright

Several reviewers were intrigued by Albright's discussion of surrealism in music, and his identification of Francis Poulenc as a key figure. "Before the recent publication of ... Untwisting the Serpent," writes Jonathan Kramer in his book Postmodern Music, Postmodern Listening (2016), "there was little serious discussion of surrealism in music (although informally calling certain music surreal is certainly common enough). Music has been assumed not to have gone through much of a surrealist stage." Kramer admires Albright's cross-disciplinary consideration of surrealism in musical theater, but believes Untwisting is "most useful....is in [its] discussions of Poulenc’s specifically musical surrealism." He quotes these words of Albright's from Untwisting:

Albright began his undergraduate career as a mathematics major, but changed to English literature. Although trained at Yale as a literary critic, after the publication of his book Representation and the Imagination: Beckett, Kafka, Nabokov, and Schoenberg, he was invited by the University of Rochester to come teach there as a kind of liaison between the department of English and the Eastman School of Music. At Rochester, he studied musicology, which forever changed his career. Much of his subsequent work has been on literature and music, culminating with his 2014 book, Panaesthetics which addresses many arts and examines to what extent the arts are many or are one. Putting Modernism Together was released posthumously, by Johns Hopkins University Press, and Music's Monism in fall 2021 from the University of Chicago Press. He was hired in 2003 in the Harvard departments of English, but later joined the Comparative Literature department and soon began offering courses in the Music department as well.

Untwisting the Serpent limited its cross-disciplinary analysis to specific examples where musicians, artists, and writers collaborated. In Albright's 2014 book Panaesthetics: On the Unity and Diversity of the Arts, he "developed a more expansive and philosophical version of his arguments by ranging across the entire history of the arts," according to Adam Parkes. In his last book, Putting Modernism Together (2016), Albright renewed his pursuit of specifically Modernist forms of aesthetic hybridity. But whereas Untwisting deliberately cut across what Albright called the "various isms that both organize and perplex the history of twentieth-century art," the final book "confront[ed] those isms head-on, and recalibrate[d] the earlier account accordingly."

From this background eventually emerged Albright's own definitive Yeats edition, The Poems, published in 1990 in the Everyman's Library series. The book restores the chronological ordering of the verse, and contains several hundred pages of critical analysis, including biographical references lacking in the Finneran edition. As noted on Albright's website, The Poems was "edited with a view to presenting a close approximation to the 'sacred book' Yeats hoped to bequeath to the world" —that is, more like the essential volume under discussion during Yeats' lifetime, before those marketing considerations intervened during the Depression and became codified in subsequent editions. Harvard professor Philip Fisher described The Poems as "[one] part Yeats, [one] part line-by-line commentary with wonderful mini-essays by Dan Albright on every topic in Yeats." Fisher laments that the book disappeared from the shelves but that is only true for the paperback edition: J. M. Dent currently publishes it in hardback in the United Kingdom.

In 1985, Albright published a review in The New York Review of Books of the Richard Finneran-edited Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, a comprehensive 1983 volume based on the Macmillan Publishers edition. Echoing criticisms of Yeats scholar Norman Jeffares, Albright took Finneran to task for preserving Macmillan's ordering of the poems, in particular placing that long but seminal early poem "The Wanderings of Oisin" at the end of the book. This was originally done by Macmillan in the 1930s for commercial reasons: the publisher felt that prospective buyers, browsing in bookstores, might be put off by a long poem at the beginning. Albright made the case for a pure chronological ordering of the poems, especially since "Oisin"'s themes reverberate throughout the later work. Albright also criticized Finneran's reluctance to use biographical interpretations in his scholarly glosses:

Albright was a literature professor at the University of Virginia when he published his third book, Representation and the Imagination: Beckett, Kafka, Nabokov and Schoenberg (1980). The Schoenberg chapter prompted an invitation to teach at the University of Rochester, with Albright acting as a kind of liaison between the department of English and the Eastman School of Music. At Rochester, Albright published Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts (2000), recently described by Adam Parkes as "an astoundingly original rewriting of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Laocoön (1766) in Modernist terms":

Albright's advisor at Yale was Richard Ellmann, author of Yeats, The Man and the Masks (1948), a pivotal Yeats biography, and The Identity of Yeats (1953), a book-length analysis of the poet's style and themes. Albright wrote of Ellman: "A conversation about a poem of Yeats' with Richard Ellmann was like a stroll through a forest with an agreeable companion who not only knows the names of every bird, bush, lichen, and bug, but also hears sounds usually audible only to bats." Albright's scholarship continues Ellmann's biographical reading of Yeats, a complex endeavor, since Yeats reflected on his life indirectly in his poems, mainly through symbols and personae. Only gradually did Yeats allow a real person, with real problems and anxieties, to emerge.

Daniel Albright (October 29, 1945 – January 3, 2015) was the Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature at Harvard and the editor of Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources. He was born and grew up in Chicago, Illinois and completed his undergraduate studies on a full scholarship at Rice in 1967. He received his MPhil in 1969 and PhD in 1970, both from Yale. Albright is also the author of the book Quantum Poetics which was published by Cambridge University Press in 1997. He held an NEH fellowship from 1973 to 1974, was a Guggenheim Fellow from 1976 to 1977, and more recently, he was a 2012 Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.

In The Identity of Yeats, Ellman notes that beginning in the 1910s, Yeats' poems became "openly autobiographical, the creation of a man capable of living in the world as well as of contemplating perfection. To make it so, he would have to lead his life in such a way that it was capable of being converted into a symbol. Moreover, he could depict the speaker of his poems in a wider variety of situations, intellectual as well as emotional." Rather than speaking through fictional characters such as Michael Robartes and Owen Aherne, Yeats made himself a primary actor, with a somewhat rigid code of self-imposed rules designed to prevent "poetry where momentary emotions would over-bubble."