“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