Yeats Smelt the Spirits

Abstract

Dodds¹ and I went to tea with W. B. Yeats in Rathfarnham. Yeats in spite of his paunch was elegant in a smooth light suit and a just sufficiently crooked bow tie. His manner was hierophantic, even when he said: ‘This afternoon I have been playing croquet with my daughter.’² We were hoping he would talk poetry and gossip, but knowing that Dodds was a professor of Greek he confined the conversation to spiritualism and the phases of the moon, retailing much that he had already printed. Burnet, Yeats said, was all wrong; the Ionian physicists had of course not been physicists at all. The Ionian physicists were spiritualists.

Extracted from The Strings Are False: An Unfinished Autobiography (London: Faber and Faber, 1965) pp. 147–8.