Abstract
Few scholars will appreciate the considerable efforts Yeats put into the composition of his two editions of A Vision. While it is proper that emphasis should be placed on the poems and plays, it is also proper that there should be investigation of the origins of A Vision, for it is possible not merely to demonstrate the conscious artistry that went into the making of this philosophical work but also to clarify the gradual development of the occult and philosophical thought which occupied many of Yeats’ s most interesting years and which can usefully gloss the poems and plays written during those years.
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Notes
For information on Yeats’s habits of composition, see Curtis Bradford, Yeats at Work (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965), pp. xi-xiv.
All publication data are from Allan Wade, A Bibliography of the Writings of W. B. Yeats, 3rd. ed., rev. and ed. Russell K. Alspach (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1968).
The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954), p. 644 (hereafter cited as Letters).
See also S. B. Bushrui, “Yeats’s Arabic Interests”, in In Excited Reverie: A Centenary Tribute to William Butler Yeats: 1865–1939, ed. A. Norman Jeffares and K. G. W. Cross (London: Macmillan, 1965), pp. 296–97.
Yeats and F. P. Sturm had an exchange over the Latin in 1926; see Frank Pearce Sturm: His Life, Letters, and Collected Work, ed. Richard Taylor (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1969), pp. 93–95.
Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (New York: Macmillan, 1948), p. 234.
In Yeats’s A Vision: An Explanation of Life Founded upon the Writings of Giraldus and upon Certain Doctrines Attributed to Kusta ben Luka (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1925).
Helen Hennessy Vendler, Yeats’s Vision and the Later Flays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), p. 255.
A similar editorial policy is stated in Denis Donoghue, ed., W. B. Yeats: Memoirs: Autobiography-First Draft; Journal (London: Macmillan, 1972), p. 15.
The reference is to Yeats’s Per Arnica Silentia Lunae (1918), [M, 331–32].
Hazard Adams published “Michael Robartes Foretells” as an appendix to Blake and Yeats: The Contrary Vision (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1955), pp, 301–05.
For studies of Yeats’s supposed admiration of Fascism, see V. K. Narayana Menon, The Development of William Butler Yeats (London: Oliver and Boyd, 1942), pp. 90–92.
John R. Harrison, The Reactionaries: Yeats, Lewis, Pound, Eliot, Lawrence: A Study of the Anti-Democratic Intelligentsia (New York: Shocken Books, 1967), pp. 39–73.
John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 4th ed. (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1930), p. 138.
In A Vision (1937), p. 206, Yeats speaks of several cultures and says that they, “having attained some Achilles in the first blossoming, find pious Aeneas in their second….”
Yeats’s reference is to Hermann Schneider, The History of World Civilization: From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages, tr. Margaret M. Green, 2 vols. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931).
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© 1975 Robert O’Driscoll and Lorna Reynolds
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Hood, W.K. (1975). Michael Robartes: Two Occult Manuscripts. In: Harper, G.M. (eds) Yeats and the Occult. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-02937-2_10
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