W. B. Yeats

W. B. Yeats occupies a crucial place in C. S. Lewis’s account of the late Bookham period, not simply as a poet but as evidence that a serious, non-Christian rejection of materialism was possible. Yeats’s belief in magic introduces a destabilizing alternative to Lewis’s reliance on scientific authority; the resulting doubt does not yet lead to Christian belief, but it reopens Lewis’s earlier fascination with the occult and merges it with his longing for Joy.

The Poet Who Believed

Among the poets Lewis read during this period, Yeats stood apart. Lewis had been reading his poetry for some time, including alongside works such as The Faerie Queene and The Earthly Paradise, before recognizing what distinguished him. Reading Yeats’s prose, including Rosa Alchemica and Per Arnica Silentia Lunae, made the difference clear: Yeats believed that the “ever living ones” were not merely inventions or objects of desire. He thought a world of beings resembling them existed and that contact between that world and the human one was possible. Lewis describes this plainly as a serious belief in magic.

The importance of this discovery lies in the kind of authority Yeats represented. Lewis’s rationalism rested on what he understood to be scientific findings, but, as a non-scientist, he accepted those findings on trust and authority. Yeats offered an opposing authority: a learned and responsible writer who was not conventionally orthodox, yet rejected materialism. Lewis says that had Yeats been a Christian, he would have dismissed his testimony, believing he had already disposed of the Christian position. Yeats instead disturbed the apparent certainty of a rationalism that depended partly on claims Lewis himself could not independently verify.

Doubt Without Conversion

Lewis did not accept Yeats’s claims categorically. The effect was more tentative: a “Perhaps” entered his materialism. He could imagine that there might be something beyond the material world while also hoping that such a possibility need not involve Christian theology. The uncertainty mattered precisely because it did not settle the question. It created room for supernatural belief outside the alternatives Lewis thought he had already considered and rejected.

Reading Maurice Maeterlinck soon extended that opening. Lewis encountered Spiritualism, Theosophy, and Pantheism in Maeterlinck’s work, finding another responsible adult, and another non-Christian, who believed in a world behind or around the material one. The book presents Yeats as the first decisive disturbance and Maeterlinck as a reinforcing influence: together they make materialism seem less like an unquestionable conclusion and more like one position among competing claims.

The Return of the Occult

Once Lewis paused over the possibility of “something else,” the occult lore and excitement stirred in him earlier by the matron at Chartres returned. Two desires that had seemed distinct now converged: the imaginative longing for Joy, and what Lewis calls a ravenous, almost prurient appetite for the occult and the supernatural as such. The conjunction was not wholly welcoming. Alongside desire came unease and an old fear associated with childhood, which Lewis recognizes as persisting beyond the nursery years.

Yeats’s significance in this account therefore carries a sharp irony. His challenge helped loosen Lewis’s confidence in materialism, but the first alternative to emerge was not faith: it was attraction to magic, strengthened by the appeal of forbidden and exclusive knowledge. Lewis connects that appeal to his existing responsiveness to the idea of a select few and to his rebellious enjoyment of a practice unorthodox by both Christian and rationalist standards. In the book’s larger moral pattern, the occult becomes the Devil following the World and the Flesh. Lewis concludes that, had an older person nearby practiced magic and recognized his susceptibility, he might have become a Satanist or a maniac. Yeats does not cause that outcome; his belief opens a breach in Lewis’s materialist certainty through which an already present fascination surges back.