1. Introduction

Yeats and the supernatural. Passion to be redeemed as earthy love rather than transcended. The human body, despite its limitations and mutability, to be celebrated rather than despised. Yeats’s conscious enlistment in the spiritual-erotic tradition (initiated by Dante and Petrarch) of obsessive and unrequited love. The ‘void’ somehow made ‘fruitful’ in Yeats’s pursuit not only of occult wisdom but of his Muse and Beloved, the elusive Maud Gonne.