“Ghost Psychology” in T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats

This thesis discusses two Modernist poets, T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats, in terms of “ghost psychology,” a term coined by Ezra Pound in discussing Japanese Noh theatre. In exploring the relationship between spiritualism and psychology, I argue that Eliot and Yeats both, in their different ways, invested in the figure of the spirit medium, or a mediumistic figure, and were drawn to the séance as a site of encounter which disturbs conventional accounts of the relationship between the living and the dead. After brief introduction of the idea of “ghost psychology” paying particular attention to its psychological and religious contexts, Chapter 1 reviews contemporary psychological accounts of mediumistic experiences, setting them beside Eliot’s poetics of the “medium” in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and other early works. Chapter 2 focuses on psychical researchers who debated the status of ghosts in psychological and metaphysical terms, and compares the concept of telepathy theorised by Frederic Myers with telepathic representations in Yeats’s theatrical and poetical works. Chapter 3 foregrounds the complex religious climate surrounding spiritualism in the Church of England from the 1920s to 1930s, and discusses what sprang out of this peculiar cultural soil in Eliot’s poetics in his middle and later period works. Chapter 4 addresses the currency of spiritualism in relationship to the sense of wartime grief during and after the Great War, the Easter Rising, and contemporary conflict in Ireland, highlighting this as context for understanding Yeats’s Noh-inspired plays. Ultimately, through an enquiry into their shared “ghost psychology,” this thesis proposes a fundamental affinity between accounts of the spirit medium circulating at the time and the many dissociated or haunted voices that figure in the dramas and poems of Eliot and Yeats.