On the night of October 24, 1917, William Butler Yeats was just four days into an already inauspicious honeymoon. At fifty-two, he had married a twenty-five-year-old named Georgie Hyde-Lees, but only after proposing marriage first to his longtime love, Maud Gonne, and then to Maud’s young daughter, Iseult. After both of them said no, he turned to George, an Englishwoman whom he knew through their common interest in magic and the occult. Between the age difference and Yeats’s continuing love for the Gonnes, things did not look promising for the newlyweds.

But that night, George found a way to win and keep Yeats’s attention: she started to talk to ghosts. For the next seven years, she would regularly go into trances and receive mystical information from spirits, which she channeled through sessions of automatic writing. As the communications from beyond got more and more elaborate, Yeats decided that what George was really trying to teach him was the secret system of the universe, a mystical plan that would explain all of history and human nature. The biographer Brenda Maddox has argued, I think convincingly, that these sessions were actually George’s half-conscious efforts to teach Yeats how to be a better husband, by paying attention to her and taking her seriously as an intellectual partner.

In any case, George’s ghosts had an important result for the history of literature. After the first session, Yeats told the ghosts that he would happily give up poetry to spend the rest of his life “explaining and piecing together” their message. “No,” came their response: “We have come to bring you metaphors for poetry.”