William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
Autograph letter signed (‘W.B. Yeats’) to Florence Farr (‘Florence Emery’), 18 Woburn Buildings, 12 June 1913
Four pages, 112 x 175mm. Provenance: Sotheby's, 21 & 22 July 1988, lot 269.

Sending a book of Tagore's poetry, mentioning a play at The Court, reporting his experiences with automatic writing and his own literary activities. Yeats mentions sending a copy of Gitanjali as well as a new book by Tagore containing ‘love poems & poems of nature’. The letter dwells mainly on a recent ‘wonderful experience’ concerning the ‘automatic writing of a girl of 27’ [see lot 195] who has correctly written in a variety of languages, including ‘Latin, Greek, Chinese, Welsh, German, Hebrew, and old Egyptian symbols ... there is no explanation but the spiritistic. Her controls seem to be mainly Greek Mystics of perhaps the second or third century B. C … she is a charming & rather saintly person’. He adds that he has been writing lyrics and will have a new book ready soon, ‘when it is out I shall go back to plays’, and compliments Farr on her letters, which make him long for a similar life, ‘perhaps I too in a few years may drift into Asia’.

Farr, a muse and former mistress of Yeats, was a member of his circle of friends in Bedford Park; Yeats wrote his Land of Heart’s Desire for her. They were both members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a society devoted to the study and practice of occult Hermeticism and metaphysics.