This chapter is dedicated to the memory of Sue Atkins, the Grande Dame of lexicography, who passed away in 2021. In a prologue we argue that she must be seen on a par with other visionaries and their visions, such as Paul Dirac in mathematics or Beethoven in music. We review the last half century through the eyes of Sue Atkins. In the process, insights of other luminaries come into the picture, including those of Patrick Hanks, Michael Rundell, Adam Kilgarriff, John Sinclair, and Charles Fillmore. This material serves as background to start thinking out of the box about the future of dictionaries. About fifty oppositions are presented, in which the past is contrasted with the future, divided into five subsections: the dictionary-making process, supporting tools and concepts, the appearance of the dictionary, facts about the dictionary, and the image of the dictionary. Moving from the future of dictionaries to the future of lexicographers, the argument is made that dictionary makers need to join forces with the Big Data companies, a move that, by its nature, brings us to the US and thus Americans, including Gregory Grefenstette, Erin McKean, Laurence Urdang, and Sidney I. Landau. In an epilogue, the presentation’s methodology is defined as being “a fact-based extrapolation of the future” and includes good advice from Steve Jobs.

Understanding the government’s role in achieving the nation’s fundamental political values provides a roadmap for appreciating why time after time, the country has expanded government sometimes in bunches and sometimes in smaller batches. Government has been necessary to create, sustain, and expand markets, to protect people from economic loss and physical injury, and to maintain a social safety net for people mired in poverty due to age, health, or market conditions, not of their doing. History establishes that the defenders of government have a good story to tell. But they must tell it. The future of the country depends on appreciating what the government does and why it does it because the government remains essential to achieving our nation and its values.

Clinicians and patients have varying degrees of comfort in discussing prognosis. Patients can swing between worry or understanding that death is near and hope or optimism that lets them live life. This prognostication awareness pendulum may require a clinician negotiate the discussion over time. The cognitive roadmap for prognosis discussion is ADAPT (Ask what they know about their medical condition, Discover what they want to know about prognosis, Anticipate ambivalence, Provide information about what to expect, and Track emotion and respond with empathy). Some patients want prognostic information, some don’t, and some are ambivalent. While respecting their wishes, exploring why in each of these scenarios may be helpful to understand their concerns and how best to address them. Be aware that patients and their family members may have different prognostic information needs. Having separate conversations (with permission) may be in order. When they are concerned about destroying hope or prognosis is uncertain, using the frame of “hope and worry” can be helpful. Finally, when patients or family members don’t believe our prognosis, be curious as to why and focus on the relationship.

In the conclusion, I reflect on Yeats’s “A General Introduction for my Work” of 1937. It is an unusual text, meant originally to introduce his collected works but left unpublished until the posthumous Essay and Introductions (1961). It leads a negative dialectical existence, severed from its original place and left to perform a fugitive function with respect to the poet’s own oeuvre. For this reason, perhaps, it serves less as an introduction than as an epilogue, a summation of certain key ideas about revivalism, his poetry, and his occult works. Yeats sees from the vantage point of his later years that his literary style – as well as the worlds it creates in his work – could only have emerged from the bedrock of the self. Two years after Yeats composed his “General Introduction,” W. H. Auden, in his elegy “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” wrote that after his death, the poet “is scattered among a hundred cities,” part of a vital future he had to leave behind: “The words of a dead man /Are modified in the guts of the living.” It is just this sort of continuance and renewal that characterize Yeats’s revivalism and his hope for coming times.

Chapter 3, on Yeats’s middle period, begins with some reflections on his prose works that help explain his evolving ideas about art and personality, ideas that he formed in large part as the result of his friendship with John Synge. The logic of misrecognition, which in the early works animated his creation of both possible and impossible worlds, in mid-career works from Responsibilities (1914) to Michael Robartes and the “Dancer” (1921) tends to emphasize the the artist’s responsibility to the actual world from which he borrows to furnish his creations. The represented world of his work thus tends to dominate over the expressed world, but this does not prevent the latter from structuring reflections on history in a way that stresses the creative agency of the poet, driven by personality, the “shaping joy” of the artist. Personality enables a form of expressiveness in which the world of the work models new relations to (and alongside) historical time. It is central to Yeats’s worldmaking project and his relation to the actual world around him.

Chapter 2 focuses on the early poetry and drama, in which Yeats discovers the worldmaking potential of art and creates at least two kinds of autonomous imaginary worlds: an impossible one based on the otherworld of faery, a parallel world of nonhuman beings and magical practices, and a possible one based on the private world of the lover and beloved, a world created in the artistic recasting of memory and desire. In the poetry, temporality is recursive and generative, with aspects of the past and future arranged in a nested fashion so that temporal moments are embedded in one another and, in a sense, produce one another. The early drama tends to express this tensed temporality in terms of the confrontation between two worlds: the actual world and the faery otherworld. These tensed temporalities enable both an accommodation of what is outside the realm of human experience and a renewed sense of the nature and limits of that experience. Misprision – the strange deceptions of the faery otherworld on the one hand and the recollected fantasies that structure so many of the early poems on the other – characterizes these new temporal arrangements.

In the sixth and final chapter, I consider the late poems and the curious prose work On the Boiler (1939), which includes the play Purgatory. I emphasize Yeats’s bardic sensibility, which is defined by relations of testament and bestowal and the double burden of witnessing the past and handing down bequests. Generational temporalities characterize the poetry in this period, inaugurated by the historical sequences in The Tower (1928). Yeats’s revivalist attitude toward time, future-oriented by way of a rectifying gaze cast on prior attitudes and achievements, continues to mature in the testamentary poems of this period, in which the modernist bard recreates, because he cannot sustain, a doomed Anglo-Protestant social order. These poems submit the heroes of the literary revival to new conditions of recognition, in which their greatness becomes an inheritance that Yeats, as their bardic representative, both announces and embodies in the world of his work. The antithesis of this inheritance can be found in On the Boiler, specifically in the play that concludes it, Purgatory. The play, Yeats’s last, is a Gothic distortion of the covenant at the heart of the testament. It subjects time and history, personal and cultural inheritance, to a withering critique that highlights both the intellectual pleasures and the potential dangers of the logic of misrecognition.

Chapter 1 establishes the contours of the Irish Revival and revivalism as we have come to understand both today. Understood as a constellation of movements, discourses, and practices, the Revival was a modernizing force in a media environment that encouraged multiple visions of Ireland’s past and its future. My discussion of the Irish Revival and revivalism situates Yeats’s literary revivalism within a broader cultural context. I argue that the Revival’s message was often constructed in a modern media environment as part of a process of remediation, whereby revivalist texts, often first published in the daily newspapers, were republished and recontextualized so that they might be recognized anew and with greater understanding. These texts also served a remedial function – that is, they were part of revivalist emphasis on self-improvement. Yeats, in concert with revivalists across a wide political spectrum, helped forge the idea of a national consciousness and a modern national literature in which the legends of ancient Ireland would find a place.

This chapter investigates fundamentalist experience in self-described fundamentalist communities in order to ascertain the structures and motivations of their experiences. It shows how fundamentalist experience provides an alternative space and time, thus separating itself from society and living in highly structured fashion. Such experience is marked by an intense preoccupation with corporeality in particular, although affect also plays an important role. Fundamentalist communities provide a whole vision of the world – a way of being in the world – that makes other ways of living impossible to envision. Fundamentalist experience is essentially not at home in the world and is marked by profound angst about its own existence. It therefore cannot allow individual appropriation of religious life, but imposes tight control on its members. Fundamentalist experience is deeply marked by the desire for assurance and security in the face of the loss of the home, the world, and one’s identity within it.

While Percy Shelley anticipates and speaks to many important subjects of “our times,” he also developed a poetry and methodology for connecting and collaborating with peoples in other places and epochs. In this account, the editors reconsider Shelley’s often binaristic historical reception as both politically radical and childishly idealist, instead offering a version of the poet who continuously rethinks categories and relations among people and their times.

In the Conclusion to this book, we move from looking back to assembling a future. This chapter shows that the metaphorical uses of disability that have been examined throughout the book remain with us in the present. And it attempts to set out some approaches towards ending this practice of making meaning out of bodies. This will require, the conclusion argues, more than a commitment to neoliberal diversity initiatives and to inclusion (though inclusion remains nonetheless urgent) – it will require us to decolonise the way that we look, and to disassemble the classical tradition in favour of models that insist on the receiver’s accountability. Maria Oshodi’s 1992 play Hound is an important text in this chapter, which looks beyond the line, or inheritance model of classical reception to the example of Stacey Park Milbern’s ‘crip ancestorship’ model. Ultimately, the conclusion is invested in the core questions of this book: what kind of an ancient world would we need to imagine, who would we need to take as our ancestors, and how might we organise the models that figure our relationship with it and them, in order for a more equal future to become our reality?

Chapter 10 discusses different types of scientific studies that need to be done to fully get a grip on the science of the fair process effect and its potentially alleviating effects on various developing instances of societal discontent. This includes field experiments and studies examining the important role of trust and issues such as perceived legitimacy, self-esteem, and personal and informational uncertainty. We also need to understand the possible downsides of the fair process effect better, for example, that sometimes people use unfair procedures to stop learning from their mistakes. The chapter further notes important normative implications about the fair process effect and that we should be aware that the effect can be used to justify the current status quo and legitimize power structures in our societies. The chapter concludes by giving directions for the development of practical interventions that may be used on the basis of this book to counter intensified distrust, heightened polarization, and strong beliefs in unfounded conspiracy theories. Ultimately, using insights on the fair process effect conveyed in this book may lead us to become better and more sociable beings, which in the end may increase the chances of us living in a better world.