Epilogue

Abstract

Unfortunately, as Yeats might have expected of a book about his esoteric philosophy, ‘the splash’ of A Vision was ‘very far off and very faint’, like that of stones he had dropped into ‘a certain very deep well’ as a child.¹ By March 1926 only AE and Frank Pearce Sturm had responded at all.² Almost as soon as he finished A Vision, Yeats began planning a revised and much different version. Having learned in the Golden Dawn that ‘much of the confusion of modern philosophy… comes from our renouncing the ancient hierarchy of beings from man up to the One’, he ‘dream[ed] of doing nothing but mystical philosophy and poetry’.³ In particular, he read Plotinus in the translation of his friend Stephen MacKenna. The point is that he read and thought about ‘mystical philosophy’ for the remainder of his life. Although he told Lady Gregory in April 1928 that he was ‘at work on the final version of A Vision’,⁴ he continued to revise and expand it until October 1937,⁵ only fifteen months before his death.