What Raftery Built

Abstract

FOR NEARLY HALF a century, readers of Allan Wade’s edition of Yeats’s Letters have thought of Thoor Ballylee as a structure that ‘Raftery built and Scott designed’. ‘Raftery’ was Wade’s transcription of the name of the builder in the early version of ‘To Be Carved On A Stone At Thoor Ballylee’ that Yeats sent to John Quinn on July 23, 1918. According to Wade, Yeats told Quinn that, ‘[o]n a great stone beside the front door will be inscribed these lines’: I, the poet, William Yeats,With common..