The Gift of George Yeats

Much scholarship has been devoted to the extraordinary experience of W.B. Yeats and his wife George on their honeymoon, when she acted as medium for the writing dictated by the spirits who came, they told Yeats, ‘to give you metaphors for poetry.’ Much has been made of Yeats’s adoption of the revealed symbolic system as it emerged into his subsequent poetry. And much has also been said about the sexual politics of the relationship between Yeats and George and the other women in his life, like Maud Gonne or Lady Gregory and their various functions from muse to patron. This chapter thinks again about these writers as correspondents with the poetry, as historical persons, amatory fantasies, spiritual personae and psychic practitioners. It focuses on George, though, and gives another version of Yeats the collaborator, the poet of correspondences: ‘Where got I that truth?’, the two-part lyric ‘Fragments’ asks: ‘Out of a medium’s mouth’ is the answer.