Yeats wrote of A Vision that, “I will never think any thoughts but these, or some modification or extension of these; when I write prose or verse they must be somewhere present though not it may be in the words…” (PEP32). If the claim contains any truth then these thoughts merit attention when approaching Yeats's “prose or verse,” yet although there certainly are poems and plays where A Vision's more detailed machinery or its presentation of history obtrude very obviously, in the majority of cases what is present in the art is the system's broader perspective and the context that these thoughts formed for Yeats's ideas, and it is these more general principles that off er a deeper understanding of his art.

However, these broader concepts are difficult to find in Yeats's expositions, since they are seldom expressed directly, and it is no easy matter to extract them from Yeats's presentation. As Graham Hough noted in his engaging but brief survey The Mystery Religion of W. B. Yeats, “a good deal of the bewilderment that faces the unprepared reader of A Vision comes simply because the fundamentals of its creed are never explicitly set out.” These fundamentals include both underlying assumptions, which are implicit but buried, and the central concepts of the system, which are often hidden in or overshadowed by local detail. There are several reasons for this neglect on Yeats's part, one of which is a deliberate choice to hedge the ideas in fictions and an attempt to create a myth, another is the almost impossible task of wrestling the material of the automatic script into coherent and sequential ideas, and yet another is a cast of mind and a style of writing ill-suited to lucid expository prose.

A further important source of difficulty is that some of the concepts had much in common with those that Yeats had encountered in his esoteric apprenticeship, and thathe assumes a similar background on the part of his readers. Hough comments that “Yeats takes for granted the conception of the destiny of the human soul” that is “common to the occult tradition,” and Yeats wrote that A Vision was “intended, to use a phrase of Jacob Boehme's, for my ‘schoolmates only’” (CW5219; E&I xi), for whom it might well have been otiose to repeat basic principles.