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Why WB Yeats devotees in Ireland are echoing a long list of grave concerns

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Recent revelations that WB Yeats’s remains still reside on the French Riviera where he was first buried, and not in County Sligo, continue a tradition of tussles over the ownership of writers’ relics

“Who rests under Ben Bulben?” asked the Irish Times’s front page last weekend, referencing WB Yeats’s poem eerily looking forward to his grave in a churchyard beneath a crag in Co Sligo. “Not Yeats,” was the paper’s blunt answer. “Papers confirm bones sent by French were not poet’s.” Yeats died in Roquebrune on the French Riviera in 1939, which prevented the return of his remains to Ireland and his widow until after the war. The letters recently unearthed confirm speculation that his bones were inexplicably disinterred and mixed up with others in 1946; the skeleton sent back for reburial in Sligo two years later, with the “tacit acceptance” of the Yeats family and the Irish foreign minister (who happened to be Maud Gonne’s son), was probably assembled from “the remains of several people” in the Roquebrune church’s ossuary. What this illustrates is that great poets’ remains can be objects of reverence to the same degree as those of saints, charismatic political leaders or rock stars, but this very preciousness entails a recurring grisly comedy of graves being dug up, coffins opened, relics purloined and tussles over ownership.

The latter have a long history, starting with Dante’s burial in Ravenna in 1321. Florence made repeated attempts to reclaim the Florentine poet, notably in a mission with papal backing and the promise of a tomb built by Michelangelo in 1519, but whenever it did so the Basilica of San Francesco’s monks removed and hid the bard’s bones so there was nothing to repatriate. Westminster Abbey was more successful in 1892 when it won the remains of Tennyson, the poet laureate, at the expense of his Lincolnshire family, but a similar bid to rob Wessex of Hardy in 1928 (backed by the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin) resulted in a peculiar compromise: his heart cut out and buried in Dorset, the rest joining Tennyson in Poets’ Corner.

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