William Butler Yeats was fifty-two years old, a well established poet and playwright, when he married twenty five year old Georgie Hyde-Lees in 1917.

"...four days after my marriage, my wife surprised me by attempting automatic writing. What came in disjointed sentences in almost illegible writing, was so exciting, sometimes so profound, that I...offered to spend what remained of [my] life explaining and piecing together those scattered sentences.

'No,' was the answer from the spirits, 'we have come to give you metaphors for poetry. '

For the same reason the spirits asked Yeats "not to read philosophy until their exposition was complete, and this increased my difficulties. Apart from two or three of the principal Platonic Dialogues I knew no philosophy. Arguments with my father, had destroyed my confidence and driven me from speculation to the direct experience of the Mystics."  7

 Yeats had attracted the notice of the spirit informants when he published Per Arnica Silentia Lunae. "I had made a distinction between the perfection that is from a man's combat with himself and that which is from a combat with circumstance."  8 Upon this distinction the spirits built "an elaborate classification of men according to their more or less complete expression of one type or the other."