Yeats's Ghosts

About this book

"Brenda Maddox looks at one of the towering literary figures of the twentieth century, W. B. Yeats, through the lens of the Automatic Script, the trancelike communication with supposed spirits that he and his much younger wife, George, conducted during the early years of their marriage. The full transcript of this intense occult adventure was not available until 1992 and remains virtually untouched by biographers. The vision papers covered more than 3,600 pages of writing, symbols and obscure diagrams penned by Yeats's wife during their 450 sittings of automatic writing. Maddox finds the scripts to have been a ghostly form of family planning - as well as one of the most ingenious ploys ever used by a wife to take her husband's mind off another woman."--BOOK JACKET. "This revealing biography flashes back to Yeats's early years (1865-1900), to the least-examined important woman in his life: his silent, dreamy mother, whose Irish ghost stories steered him onto his occultist path. The book then returns to the mature Yeats, to analyze, with new information and a sharp feminine perspective, his public career in Ireland, his sexual rejuvenation operation and his obsession with several younger women - and relates them all to the triumph of his late poetry."--BOOK JACKET.