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In the mid-1930s, William Butler Yeats wrote two plays that feature a poet figure who confronts his muse and is subsequently beheaded. The King of the Great Clock Tower and A Full Moon in March are, on the one hand, Yeats's attempts to work through, in words, the writer's block that had plagued him for the past few years-an especially resourceful method of turning the problem into its own solution. But these severed-head plays also reflect other, equally complex issues and concerns in Yeats's life at the time, namely his immersion in Hindu thought and iconography and the sexual impotence that contributed to his decision to undergo the often misunderstood genito-urinary Steinach operation in April of 1934. Yeats elected to have this questionable surgery because he believed it would enhance his sexual function and thereby also his creative powers. This much is not disputed. But critics until now have ignored a crucial factor in this equation: that Yeats was predisposed to trust the medical theories behind the Steinach operation because they corresponded so perfectly with the ideas about sexuality and mental vitality that he was discovering in Hinduism, the philosophy of single greatest interest to Yeats in the early 1930s. Moreover, I argue that the severed-head plays are, in fact, his means of processing symbolically what the surgery had meant to him personally in terms of his sexuality and creativity and that the imperious Queen- Muse figure in the plays is based on the Tantric interpretation of the Hindu goddess Kali. Exploring the nexus of these ideas sheds new light on Yeats's reasons for having the surgery and on the enigmatic plays that resulted from it.
Perspectives on the Steinach Operation: A Brief Overview
For decades following W. B. Yeats's 1934 Steinach operation, literary cohorts and critics alike were perplexed by the exact nature of the genito-urinary surgery and, since it was rumored to involve the transplantation of monkey testicles, were incredulous that anyone, even someone as eccentric as Yeats, would undergo it. Fellow Irish writer Frank O'Connor quipped that the Steinach operation was "like putting a Cadillac engine in a Ford car"1; Anthony Burgess, through his fictional writer Rawcliffe, criticizes "monkey-gland boys [like] Yeats" for "not playing the game," for managing to write worthy...