Abstract
“The Crazed Moon” (VP 487) is one of Yeats’s delphic, and least discussed, poems. The neglect of this poem is unfortunate because, when understood in terms of its veiled references to the Neoplatonic interpretation of the myth and ritual of Dionysus, it yields rich affinities with the main current of Yeats’s work and revealing insight into his thinking about the nature of poetic inspiration.
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Notes
E.g., Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough 3rd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1911–15), VI, pp. 17, 24, 32. Further references in the text are cited as GB.
Erwin Rohde, Psyche (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1925) p. 257.
Psyche was praised in Lewis Richard Farnell’s Greek Hero Cults and Ideas of Immortality (Oxford: Clarendon, 1921), which Yeats owned.
H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine: the synthesis of science religion and philosophy (London: Theosophical Publishing House, 1888, rpt. 1921 ) I, p. 430.
Thomas Taylor, A Dissertation on the Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries (Amsterdam, 1790) pp. 72–3. Hereafter Taylor.
F. A. C. Wilson, W. B. Yeats and Tradition ( London: Gollancz, 1958 ) p. 59.
C. G. Jung, Collected Works, eds Sir Herbert Read et al. (Princeton University Press, 1957–67), VII, p. 113.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy trans. Wm. A. Haussmann (London: Foulis, 1910) pp. 82, 121.
C. Kerenyi, Dionysus, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Bollingen, 1976 ) p. 260.
Helen Vendler, The Odes of John Keats ( Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1983 ) p. 141.
Helen Vendler, Yeats’s Vision and the Later Plays ( Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963 ) p. 96.
G. R. S. Mead, Orpheus ( London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1896 ) p. 139.
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© 1987 Warwick Gould
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Hassett, J.M. (1987). “The Crazed Moon” and the Myth of Dionysus. In: Gould, W. (eds) Yeats Annual No. 5. Yeats Annual. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-06841-8_19
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