A picture of an elderly Yeats sitting with a topless younger woman in a garden, details of his "sexual rejuvenation" operation and extra-marital relationships and a compelling argument why the bones at Drumcliffe are probably not his at all are just some of the reasons why a new biography of the Nobel prize-winning poet should raise eyebrows.
George's Ghosts by Brenda Maddox, an American, will throw new light on Yeats for those who would be reluctant to read more scholarly work. And readers can be assured that it is the work of a highly-respected journalist and biographer - her books on Nora Barnacle and D. H. Lawrence were deservedly award-winning.
In Sligo this week to address the Yeats Society, Ms Maddox said the details about the poet's sex life were not new and she had just written the story in more accessible language. "For some reason it's controversial when a journalist or biographer does it; it's not controversial when an academic scholar does it."
The book begins in 1917, the year of Yeats's marriage at the age of 51 to George, and devotes much attention to the "Automatic Script" or vision papers - a communication conducted with supposed spirits by the poet and his wife over a number of years.
The text of this script was published in full for the first time in 1992 by a team of scholars at Florida State University. To Ms Maddox it represented "a biographical goldmine" and it spurred her towards writing the book. "I thought that if I don't do it someone else is going to."
George's Ghosts also looks at the influence of "the least-examined of the important women in his life" - his mother - and gives an account of his final years. The picture painted, drawing almost entirely on Yeats's writings, is of an ageing man desperate to retain his virility, who delighted in numerous opportunities to test it on a succession of much younger women.
Yeats's role in public life is also dealt with and his Seanad speech pleading for the newly-founded State to legalise divorce is all the more interesting in view of recent changes in Irish society.
Ms Maddox said she hoped she showed Yeats "first and foremost" as a great poet. She stressed that he referred openly to his sexual life in his work and said he wanted to be spoken of with candour after his death. "This is a man who called himself a wild, old wicked man."
She added: "This is a story of a man who wanted to know where his visions came from and was determined to keep them coming, and he more or less would pay any price. He used drugs, women, visions and seances most of all. His own reverie and fantasy was the stuff of his poetry and he never shied away from it."
Her examination of the "Automatic Script" led her to the conclusion that it was "an oblique form of communication between a young wife and an ageing husband who did not know each other very well". (George was 27 years younger than Yeats.)
Ms Maddox believes it served their separate purposes; it held the marriage together and brought him metaphors for his poetry, and to what extent they were both colluding in playing the game is impossible to tell.
Ms Maddox makes a very convincing argument that George used the script as an ingenious ploy to take control of the couple's family planning. She points out that passages of the script are practically copied from a book of the time by Marie Stopes, which gave very specific instructions on how often couples should have sexual intercourse.
"It is amazingly unghostly," said Ms Maddox of lines in the script such as "I have been under the impression that we have been too irregular lately". Most telling of all is that the script came to an end soon after the couple's second child was born.
Ms Maddox also stressed that George was much more than just the woman who provided Yeats with his much-desired children. "She is the most unrecognised muse in Yeats's life." In later years, George, busy with the children and administration work for the poet, was willing to share the burden of his day-to-day care with other women.
After writing the book, Ms Maddox liked the man "who was never afraid to make a fool of himself". She would prefer to sit beside him at dinner than Joyce. "One thing that did surprise me was how amusing he was, how entertaining, what good company people found him, and at the same time how enormously hardworking and productive he was."
In the final chapter, she details the saga of how the great poet's "remains" were taken from France to Sligo, and concludes that there is "a fair chance" that it is not actually his body which lies under Ben Bulben's head.
"If you trace the evidence of how hastily those bones were assembled once the controversy started, the chances are that they got the wrong ones, it seems to me."
DNA testing could ascertain the truth in a few hours if people really wanted to know. She closes the book by asking if it really matters, a point with which North West Tourism would surely agree. Ms Maddox said "in the end we'll always go to Drumcliffe and read the marvellous words and look at the marvellous mountain".
Ms Maura McTighe, of the Yeats Society, said she believed Yeats scholars would love the book because it was well written, well researched and brought out the human side of the man.
"Perhaps people who haven't attended lectures or read much about him might say: `Gosh, we did think this was his body, or we didn't think he had women friends', but people who have read other articles about Yeats will know that these are not new statements."
George's Ghosts is published by Picador.