Adrian Paterson

“How on earth, we wonder, could a man of Yeats’s gifts take such nonsense seriously?” exclaimed W. H. Auden. “How could Yeats . . . take up something so essentially lower-middle class—or should I say Southern Californian?” [1] Auden’s incredulous geography was more accurate than he knew. Perhaps the peak of Yeats’s lifelong interest in what Auden dismissively called the “mumbo jumbo of magic” (“mediums, spells, the Mysterious Orient— how embarrassing”) were the “sleeps,” joint experiments by W...