After John McGahern's death in 2006 it inevitably became more difficult to say with certainty how and why he made certain artistic decisions. I am thinking particularly of his choice of titles. Of his late story ‘Love of the World’ – also the title chosen by the editor for McGahern's posthumously published essays – Stanley van der Ziel has argued that it is drawn from Hannah Arendt. He also guides us to Memoir where the phrase is used by McGahern in one of his many reveries about the beauty and mystery of human existence: ‘We grow into a love of the world, a love that is all the more precious and poignant because the great glory of which we are but a particle is lost almost as soon as it is gathered’. While McGahern's admiration for Arendt is undoubted, I would like to argue here that the title ‘Love of the World’ is drawn not primarily from Arendt but from one of the central poems of the Yeatsian oeuvre, ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’. There are compelling reasons for such a reading, and the choice made by McGahern to allude to this poem is important, permitting us to speculate on several of his artistic and philosophic preoccupations, most notably the rectitude of exalting the inner man over the outer, prioritizing the life of contemplation over action.