The Supernatural

Yeats's awareness of the supernatural began at an early age. While living with his grandparents in Sligo, he saw "a supernatural bird in the corner of the room." He relates that he dreamed one night that his grandfather's ship had wrecked. The next morning he awoke to find that his dream had come true. These and other events prompted Yeats to consider the existence of spirits or of an alternative plane of reality and launched his life-long interest in the supernatural.

Autobiographies is filled with stories of unexplained events, spirit contact, séances, and other paranormal activities witnessed by Yeats and others. These experiences, in fact, became an integral part of the folk tales Yeats so eagerly collected in support of a national literature for Ireland. After an episode in the essay, "Reveries Over Childhood and Youth," in which he relates seeing unexplained lights in the...