Unlike many canonized literary figures, William Butler Yeats endures as a curious and multifarious point of reference for both the academic community and purveyors of more popular media. Yeats allusions, references, and evocations span time, location, and genre, but their volume and consistency clearly indicate that Yeats matters. His name retains an authoritative, enduring, and uniquely protean capital; his literary signature aids the writer and affords resources, aligning it with a distinctive, though vaguely defined, literary tradition, historically popular and urbane, that simultaneously exploits, asserts, and perpetuates Yeats’s eminent and mutable position in the increasingly globalized, transnational cultural memory of the last half century. Through discussions of Richard Ellmann’s relationship with George Yeats, Yeats’s (re)politicization by Said and Kiberd near the end of the century, and Yeats’s appearances in television/film, I explore how Yeats’s poetry and personage have been tangled in complex notions of national, ethnic and social power across the 20th century.