The Yeats Problem

On Epigraphs, Yelp Reviews, and the Voices That Open a Chapter

15 August 2026 ~ 3 min read

Here’s the problem with the poet William Butler Yeats: he’s too good. You put a Yeats epigraph at the top of a chapter and it casts a shadow over everything that follows. The reader walks in expecting marble and gold. If your chapter delivers marble and gold, the epigraph was redundant. If it doesn’t, the epigraph makes your prose look thin. Either way, Yeats wins and you lose.

I used him anyway. Of course I did. You don’t write a trilogy steeped in Irish mythology and skip Yeats. But I learned quickly that an epigraph isn’t decoration—it’s a tuning fork. It sets the frequency the reader hears before the first sentence lands.

Choose wrong and the whole chapter vibrates at the wrong pitch.

The Cosmic Janitor Trilogy uses epigraphs the way a DJ uses transitions. Yeats opens a chapter about the Morrígan because he understood the terrifying beauty of Irish myth better than almost anyone. Joyce opens a chapter set in a bureaucratic nightmare because no one captured the cosmic absurdity of paperwork like Joyce. Beckett opens a chapter about waiting—because who else? Each one tells the reader how to listen before the music starts.

But here’s where it gets interesting. The Trilogy also uses epigraphs from the Book of Ravens—a fictional sacred text from the world of the novel—and from sources that have no business appearing next to Yeats. A U2 lyric. A line from a Cork taxi driver. And yes, a Yelp review.

The Yelp review opens a chapter about Hell’s customer service department. It’s a one-star review of the Eternal Wellness Spa complaining about the temperature, the ambiance, and the fact that the complimentary tea “tasted like regret.” Putting that next to a Yeats quote three chapters earlier was one of the most deliberate choices I made. Because the Trilogy lives in the space between reverence and irreverence—between myth and Monday morning—and the epigraphs needed to do the same thing.

The Book of Ravens quotations were a different challenge. When you invent a sacred text, every line has to feel ancient and inevitable, like it was carved into stone before you were born. But it also has to feel like it belongs in the same book as the Yelp review. That tension—sacred and profane, mythic and mundane—is the engine of the Trilogy. The epigraphs are where the reader feels it first.

Choosing an epigraph is like choosing the key signature for a piece of music. It doesn’t determine what happens, but it determines how everything sounds. A chapter in D minor feels different from the same chapter in G major. Yeats puts you in one key. A Yelp review puts you in another. The trick—the real craft—is making the reader believe they belong in the same composition.

I still worry about the Yeats chapters. He’s still too good. But I’ve made my peace with it. If you’re going to be overshadowed, at least be overshadowed by the best. And if the next chapter opens with a one-star review of the afterlife, maybe the contrast is the point.

~ Liam