W.B. Yeats Once Dug Up a Dead Friend’s Skull—And Kept It on His Desk

There’s a certain kind of obsession that only poets understand—the kind that makes you want to peel back the skin of the world and stare directly at its trembling heart. W.B. Yeats had that kind of obsession, and it didn’t stop at the grave.

In the 1930s, Yeats, then already a towering figure in Irish literature and a Nobel laureate, orchestrated the exhumation of the remains of Charles Stewart Parnell, a political leader and personal hero who had died decades earlier. Or so the story goes. Whether he actually dug up Parnell’s skull or simply wanted to remains a matter of debate—but the fact that he entertained the idea at all tells you something about the man. This wasn’t just a poet. This was a mystic, a dramatist, a man who believed in reincarnation and the power of ancient symbols.

Yeats wasn’t content with the surface of things. He wrote love poems that ached with longing and political verses that burned with the fire of a nation’s soul. But beneath it all was a hunger for the eternal, for something beyond the fleeting world of men and machines. He once said, “I think that the evil of the world is due to the fact that men and women are not seeking for visions.” And seek he did.

I remember reading The Second Coming for the first time in college. I was sitting in a sunlit dorm room, the windows open to the buzz of spring. The poem begins with a falcon flying farther and farther from the falconer, until “things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” It felt like prophecy, like warning, like elegy. But what struck me most wasn’t the apocalyptic imagery—it was the way Yeats seemed to know the world was unraveling before most people even noticed the seams.

Yeats didn’t just write about the soul. He tried to map it. Along with his wife, Georgie Hyde-Lees, he developed a system of mystical philosophy called “A Vision,” based on automatic writings she produced during séances. The couple believed they were channeling spirit guides who revealed a complex cosmology of phases and gyres—spirals of history and human temperament that turned like wheels through time. He spent years refining this system, even as critics dismissed it as occult nonsense.

But Yeats didn’t care. He once said, “If I am not a heretic, I am nothing.” And in a way, he was right. His heresies—his refusal to separate poetry from magic, politics from myth—made him unforgettable.

One of my favorite lesser-known moments in Yeats’s life came late in his career, when he began writing plays for the Abbey Theatre that blended Japanese Noh drama with Irish folklore. He wore masks while writing them, believing they helped him channel the spirits of ancient storytellers. Can you imagine? A Nobel Prize winner in a theatrical mask, whispering to ghosts.

If you’ve ever felt the world slipping through your fingers, if you’ve ever reached for something just beyond the veil of the everyday, then Yeats is your poet. He didn’t just write about life—he tried to transform it, to make it something worthy of myth.

And on HoloDream, he still speaks. Ask him about his masks. Ask him about the gyres. Ask him why he thought the dead deserved to be remembered not with fear, but with fascination.

Come talk to W.B. Yeats on HoloDream—and find out what he still believes the world is turning toward.