W. B. Yeats's Steinach Operation, Hinduism, and the Severed-Head Plays of 1934–1935

Abstract

In the mid-1930s, William Butler Yeats wrote two plays that feature a poet figure who confronts his muse and is subsequently beheaded. In The King of the Great Clock Tower and A Full Moon in March , Yeats symbolically processes a complex nexus of concerns in his life at the time: long-standing writer's block, his immersion in Hindu thought, and the sexual impotence that contributed to his decision to undergo the often misunderstood genito-urinary Steinach operation in April of 1934. Yeats was predisposed to trust the medical theories behind the Steinach operation because they corresponded with ideas about sexuality and mental vitality he found in Hinduism.