Abstract
It is part of the peculiarity of Yeats’s interest in the occult that he began writing his greatest treatises, PASL and A Vision , at a time of complex and often painful relationships with women. Much as Iseult Gonne’s presence is felt in PASL, Georgie Hyde-Lees’s influence on his final statement of ‘personal philosophy’ counts as incomparably more important. However, nothing, especially Yeats’s less than heartfelt letters to his future wife, suggested that she would come to play such an important role in his life, both spiritual and material. It was particularly the two months preceding their marriage that boded ill for the newlyweds.
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Notes
- 1.
Brown, The Life of W. B. Yeats, 258.
- 2.
Yeats seems to have been equally, if not more, desirous to give George her due in the creation of A Vision as he was prepared to acknowledge Lady Gregory’s aid in the writing of for example Cathleen ni Houlihan .
- 3.
Margaret Mills Harper , Wisdom of Two: The Spiritual and Literary Collaboration of George and W. B. Yeats (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 93. The problematic authorship that Mills Harper explores at length attracted G. R. S. Mead’s criticism in a review in the occultist periodical The Quest, where Mead, Yeats’s old acquaintance from the Theosophical Society, attacks the poet for fictionalizing the matter of the book’s inception and then not keeping to the rigors of the scientific analysis of supernatural phenomena. ‘A Vision’. The Quest 18 (October 1926), 96–98.
- 4.
AE, ‘On the Coherence of “A Vision”, This Extraordinary Book’, in W. B. Yeats: The Critical Heritage, 269, 272. Referring to AE’s hesitant praise, an anonymous reviewer in the Church of Ireland Gazette praised Yeats’s treatise, comparing it to Blake’s work. Church of Ireland Gazette 4 (February 1938), 77.
- 5.
Edmund Wilson , ‘Yeats’s Guide to the Soul’, New Republic (16 January 1929), 251.
- 6.
MacNeice, The Poetry of W. B. Yeats, 112.
- 7.
MacNeice, The Poetry of W. B. Yeats, 114. This tantalizing connection between Yeats’s idea and Engels’s is never elaborated on in a more in-depth manner though it is interesting to observe a similar intellectual construct in Yeats and the materialist Engels, especially in view of Cullingford’s idea (based on Yeats’s own suggestion in Ex 333–334) that A Vision is in fact a response to materialist socialism. Yeats, Ireland and Fascism (London: Macmillan, 1981), 127.
- 8.
Richard Ellmann , The Identity of Yeats (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), 162, 163.
- 9.
Helen Vendler , Yeats’s Vision and the Later Plays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963).
- 10.
Northrop Frye , ‘The Rising of the Moon: A Study of A Vision’, in An Honoured Guest, ed. Denis Donoghue and J. R. Mulryne (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1965), 14.
- 11.
R. O. F., ‘Invisible Beings Communicated with Mr. Yeats, He Says’, Irish Independent 2 (October 1937), 4.
- 12.
Bloom, Yeats, 210.
- 13.
Kathleen Raine , Yeats the Initiate: Essays on Certain Themes in the Work of W. B. Yeats (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 1990), 107. Raine stresses the connection between Yeats’s categories (especially Anima Mundi) and C. G. Jung’s archetypes, a path of exploration of the poet’s output taken up in some detail by James Olney , The Rhizome and the Flower: The Perennial Philosophy—Yeats and Jung (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), especially 150–183.
- 14.
Miranda B. Hickman, The Geometry of Modernism: The Vorticist Idiom in Lewis, Pound, H.D., and Yeats (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), 195.
- 15.
Margaret Mills Harper’s Wisdom of Two remains among the most thorough readings of the system and its unravelling in the automatic script. Along with her study, a collection of essays on A Vision recently brought together by Neil Mann , Matthew Gibson and Claire Nally offers meticulous analyses of the working of the system and its various contexts.
- 16.
Bell, Yeats and the Logic of Formalism, 90.
- 17.
Meticulous accounts of the working of the system are given by R. Ryan , ‘The Is and the Ought, the Knower and the Known: An Analysis of the Four Faculties in Yeats’s System’ in W. B. Yeats’s A Vision. Explications and Contexts, ed. N. Mann, M. Gibson, and C. V. Nally (Clemson: Clemson University Digital Press, 2012), 22–54; and G. A. Dampier , ‘“The Spiritual Intellect’s Great Work”: A Discussion of the Principles and A Vision’s Account of Death’ in W. B. Yeats’s A Vision, 55–89. See also, Colin McDowell , ‘“The Completed Symbol”: Daimonic Existence and the Great Wheel in A Vision (1937)’, YA6, 193–210.
- 18.
Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 326.
- 19.
Timothy Materer , ‘Occultism’ in W. B. Yeats in Context, 242, 243.
- 20.
Cormack, Yeats and Joyce, 143.
- 21.
Yeats explains the change in a footnote to A Vision A: ‘I have changed the “creative genius” of the Documents into Creative Mind to avoid confusion between ‘genius’ and Daimon; and “Ego” into Will for “Ego” suggests the total man who is all Four Faculties. Will or self-will was the only word I could find not for man but Man’s root’ (CW13 15).
- 22.
This understanding of Mask in A Vision A and B is directly borrowed from the 1907 theorization of the idea. However, now personality, which was closely associated with Mask, is regarded as the product not only of all that is opposed to character (approximated by the Will) but also as an opposition to fate and its destined intellectual proclivities.
- 23.
George Mills Harper and Margaret Mills Harper , eds., Yeats’s Vision Papers, Volume 4 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 241.
- 24.
Harper, Yeats’s Vision Papers, Volume 4, 243.
- 25.
Dan C. Marinescu , Complex Systems and Clouds: A Self-Organization and Self-Management Perspective (Cambridge MA: Morgan Kaufmann, 2017), 14.
- 26.
See Katherine Ebury , ‘”A New Science”: Yeats’s A Vision and Relativistic Cosmology’, Irish Studies Review 2 (2014), 177–79.
- 27.
Neil Mann , ‘”Everywhere that Antinomy of the One and the Many”: The Foundations of A Vision’ in W. B. Yeats’s A Vision, 5.
- 28.
Matthew Gibson , ‘“Timeless and Spaceless”?—Yeats’s Search for Models of Interpretation in Post-Enlightenment Philosophy, Contemporary Anthropology and Art History, and the Effects of These Theories on “The Completed Symbol,” “The Soul in Judgment” and “The Great Year of the Ancients”’ in W. B. Yeats’s A Vision, 113. See AVB 210.
- 29.
This compensatory nature of artistic production and Unity of Being recurs throughout the script; see YVP1 245, 410. Donoghue points out that in ‘Circus Animals’ Desertion’, as in other poems , beginning with the ‘The Song of the Happy Shepherd’, ‘poetry is featured as compensation for the failure of love […]’, Yeats, 112.
- 30.
Odo Marquard , ‘Homo Compensator’, in Der Mensch und die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (Innsbruck: Solaris Verlag, 1988), 59–66. This incomplete, questing figure has been traced by Daniel Albright to the persona of the fool, ‘The Fool by the Pool’, YA7, 57. He does not refer to Marquard but the notion of ‘homo compensator’ is relevant to his discussion throughout.
- 31.
Donoghue, Yeats, 41. This idea has been traced by Snukal to ‘Lapis Lazuli ’ and some later poems , High Talk, 157.
- 32.
Ellmann, The Man and the Masks, 238.
- 33.
Joseph Ronsley , Yeats’s Autobiography. Life as Symbolic Pattern (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 6.
- 34.
Roy F. Foster , The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland (London: Penguin, 2001), 67.
- 35.
McAteer, Yeats and European Drama, 151.
- 36.
In each of them, Yeats keeps stressing that the origin of the treatise is a book that has long been lost: ‘I found that though their Sacred Book had been lost they had a vast doctrine which was constantly explained to their growing boys and girls by the aid of diagrams drawn by old religious men upon the sands’ (CW13 lxi). Therefore A Vision is shown to be only an abridged version of a doctrine whose source is shrouded in mystery but which has with years assumed an oral character that is unsuitable for print.
- 37.
Mann, “Everywhere that Antinomy of the One and the Many”, 15.
- 38.
In the script the Phase for Shakespeare’s England was ‘14 to 15’ (YVP1 469) but the description in ‘Dove or Swan’ suggests that Phase 14, the Obsessed Man, is closer to what Yeats came to have in mind.
- 39.
Fran Braerton , The Great War in Irish Poetry: W. B. Yeats to Michael Longley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 61.
- 40.
Ibid., 50.
- 41.
David Dwan, The Great Community: Culture and Nationalism in Ireland (Dublin: Field Day, 2008), 83.
- 42.
The manuscript word seems to be ‘hierarchical’ rather than ‘hieratical’, as the transcription in Explorations suggests. I am grateful to Neil Mann for pointing that out to me.
- 43.
Muldoon, The End of the Poem, 21.
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Pietrzak, W. (2017). Dichotomies Multiplied: A Vision . In: The Critical Thought of W. B. Yeats. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60089-5_6
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