Note sull'episodio
In 1948 a French forensic doctor pieced together a skeleton from a communal ossuary so that an Irish naval ship could bring W.B. Yeats home, in an operation overseen by Sean MacBride, son of the woman Yeats loved and the man he loathed. This episode uses that ironic homecoming to explore how a dyslexic, tone-deaf member of the fading Protestant Ascendancy forged the modern soul of Ireland by bypassing religion and politics for myth, folklore and the landscape of Sligo.
The conversation follows Yeats into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and seances with Leo Africanus, through four rejected proposals to Maud Gonne and a single night in Paris, to the founding of the Abbey Theatre, Ezra Pound's edits and the influence of Japanese Noh drama. It covers his shock at the 1916 Easter Rising, his Senate warning against banning divorce, his later admiration for Mussolini and the Blueshirts, the marriage to George Hyde-Lees and their automatic writing, the 1923 Nobel Prize framed as recognition of the Irish Free State, and the Steinach operation that fueled his final creative burst.
- Born into a ruling class that was losing its grip: the wrong kind of Irish
- Ritual magic as the center of everything he thought and wrote
- Maud Gonne's rejections as the emotional engine of his middle period
- Notre Dame, Oedipus Rex and the demand for an uncensored Irish stage
- Proposals to Maud and Iseult, marriage to George, and a book dictated by spirits