“Man has created death,” Yeats wrote, and his last collection of poems with its stark title represents the poet’s increasingly baffled attempt not only to create his own death but also to stage-manage his memorial from beyond the tomb. The effort demanded the erection of a perfected effigy of himself. Through poetry he would dictate not merely the idealized contours of his own image but even the mundane details of his funeral and interment. “Under Ben Bulben,” the superb testamentary poem which opens the collection, stipulates both his epitaph and his final resting place. Yeats intended through this poem to prevent a state funeral; as he wrote to Dorothy Wellesley, a few months before his death, “I write my poems for the Irish people but I am damned if I will have them at my funeral.” We all know, of course, what happens to the best-laid plans. Yeats died in France in January 1939 and was buried there. A decade later, his remains were exhumed and returned to Ireland to be buried in Drumcliff churchyard under the promontory of Ben Bulben; and yet, there is to this day some doubt as to whether it was in fact Yeats’s mortal remains that were re-interred in his native soil or those of some other, unknown deceased. To complicate matters further, as James Pethica magisterially demonstrates in this latest volume of the Cornell Yeats,[1]there is even some question as to whether Yeats’s celebrated epitaph was not in fact accidentally truncated.