ABSTRACT
What degree of awareness did William Butler Yeats and Arthur Conan Doyle have of each other, both being of Irish descent and deeply involved in the study of the occult and the practice of spiritualism? Doyle’s public recognition of Yeats’s stature as poet-prophet occurs in two of his writings, The Land of Mist (1926) and The Edge of the Unknown. On the other hand, Yeats’s appreciation of Doyle’s views on the occult appears in his powerful spiritualist play The Words Upon the Window-Pane (1930). Besides these two striking instances of direct evidence of the interaction between these two writers, this chapter records several instances of circumstantial evidence suggesting their mutual recognition of each other’s work.
