W. B. Yeats, 1923 Nobel Prize winner, hoped his “double” and “anti-self” “Leo” was a genuine spirit, but admitted “Leo” might be “a secondary personality”

“It was at Wimbledon, in 1912, that Yeats felt himself contacted by the spirit claiming to be ‘Leo’…’Leo’…said he had been with Yeats since childhood as his ‘opposite’…’Leo’ thereafter frequently reappeared to Yeats, who was so stirred that he began composing a correspondence with this alternate self…This imaginary dialogue was not wasted. It inspired the great antiphonal poem ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’ written in 1915,” which included the following lines:

“I call to the mysterious one who yet

Shall walk the wet sands by the edge of the stream

And look most like me, being indeed my double,

And prove of all imaginable things

The most unlike, being my anti-self…”

“Yeats freely confessed that his useful sparring partner ‘Leo’ might come from his own imagination. As he explained in 1917 to Sir William Barrett, past President of the Society for Psychical Research, ‘I think one should deal with a control on the working hypothesis that it is genuine. This does not mean that I feel any certainty on the point, but even if it is a secondary personality that should be the right treatment’ " (1, pp. 9-10).

1. Brenda Maddox. George’s Ghosts: A New Life of W. B. Yeats. London, Picador, 1999.