Thinking of the censorious and anti-intellectual Ireland in which he grew up, McGahern recalls the very profound impression left on him by the realization that he had at least one Irish literary forebear who had risen above it all and reigned, however briefly, over the empire of the imagination:

‘Yeats’, he puts it more informally in some scribbled notes on his favourite of the Sligo writer's plays, Purgatory, ‘always instinctively knew what he was at’. This is classic McGahern locution: understated, admiring and accurate all at the same time, and it sums up his unmatched reverence for Ireland's greatest poet. McGahern read voraciously across all of Yeats's work. Unlike some critics, he took Yeats's plays seriously, and though Purgatory remained the one with most hold over him, he read them all and, I will argue in later chapters, used at least two lesser known dramatic works, Where There is Nothing and The Land of Heart's Desire, as inspiration for his fiction. Yeats's poetry is never far from McGahern's mind. Even Yeats's more obtuse, esoteric work plays its part in forming McGahern's aesthetic practice – A Vision, McGahern writes, is a ‘rag bag but useful’. When trying to define what constitutes ‘great’ writing McGahern allows himself to use a word that held no fear for Yeats but from which most writers, and nearly all critics, shy away: ‘all great writing has a spiritual quality that we can recognize but never quite define. […] Call it moral fragrance or style or that older, healing word – magic’.