ABSTRACT
In 1900, after publically declaring his support for the anti-British forces in the Boer War, W.B. Yeats was rumoured to have been deprived of a family subvention by his loyalist uncle George Pollexfen who was then chief executive of the family’s shipping and grain-supply business,W.G.T. Pollexfen Company Ltd.1 The company operated internationally, but its headquarters were in Sligo, roughly locatable between ‘Knocknarea’ and ‘Ben Bulben’, a good walk from ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, a stone’s throw from ‘Drumcliffe churchyard’, set back from Rosses Point, and just down the road from Lissadell House: it was a silent and invisible partner in the production of a famous poetic myth. After all, it was from his mother’s well-heeled, Pollexfen-funded ‘Sligo girlhood’ that Yeats had borrowed his longing for the West of Ireland, and from the example of her thrift when living in exile in London, and her ultimately fatal ‘anxiety about money’, that he had learned his starkest lesson about modern economy (Au 31). As his father would never tire of reminding him, the poet was a Pollexfen as well as being a Yeats.2
