Episode Details

W.B. Yeats won the Nobel Prize, led the Irish Literary Revival, and wrote some of the most quoted poetry in the English language. Then he died in France in 1939, and things got strange — his body was exhumed years later, shipped home, and reburied in Ireland under circumstances that suggest the bones may not even be his.

This episode traces Yeats from his mystical childhood through his unrequited obsession with Maud Gonne, his occult experiments, his Senate career, and the macabre saga of his contested remains.

• He proposed to Maud Gonne multiple times over decades and was rejected every time
• He was deeply involved in occult societies and conducted seances with his wife
• He served as a Senator in the Irish Free State from 1922 to 1928
• Scholars have raised serious doubts about whether the bones reburied in Sligo are actually his