Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Content
- List of Figures and Diagrams
- Preface
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- “Everywhere that antinomy of the One and the Many”: The Foundations of A Vision
- The Is and the Ought, the Knower and the Known: An Analysis of the Four Faculties in Yeats's System
- “Spiritual Intellect's Great Work”: A Discussion of the Principles and A Vision's Account of Death The
- Ancient Frames: Classical Philosophy in Yeats's A Vision
- “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”
- W. B. Yeats's A Vision: “Dove or Swan”
- The Thirteenth Cone
- Shifting Sands: Dancing the Horoscope in the Vision Papers
- “Metaphors for Poetry”: Concerning the Poems of A Vision and Certain Plays for Dancers
- A Vision of Ezra Pound
- Reflected Voices, Double Visions
- Yeats's Vision and the Feminine
- Esotericism and Escape
- The Political Occult: Revisiting Fascism, Yeats and A Vision
- Glossary
- Index
Ancient Frames: Classical Philosophy in Yeats's A Vision
- Frontmatter
- Content
- List of Figures and Diagrams
- Preface
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- “Everywhere that antinomy of the One and the Many”: The Foundations of A Vision
- The Is and the Ought, the Knower and the Known: An Analysis of the Four Faculties in Yeats's System
- “Spiritual Intellect's Great Work”: A Discussion of the Principles and A Vision's Account of Death The
- Ancient Frames: Classical Philosophy in Yeats's A Vision
- “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”
- W. B. Yeats's A Vision: “Dove or Swan”
- The Thirteenth Cone
- Shifting Sands: Dancing the Horoscope in the Vision Papers
- “Metaphors for Poetry”: Concerning the Poems of A Vision and Certain Plays for Dancers
- A Vision of Ezra Pound
- Reflected Voices, Double Visions
- Yeats's Vision and the Feminine
- Esotericism and Escape
- The Political Occult: Revisiting Fascism, Yeats and A Vision
- Glossary
- Index
Summary
In both its 1925 and 1937 versions, W. B. Yeats's A Vision is a text that self-consciously frames its own argument. In the latter edition, the prefatory material collected in “A Packet for Ezra Pound” repeatedly dwells on the issue of geometrical abstraction, and how the text's doctrines may present an overly austere challenge to the reader. Even before any explicit mention, the opening sentence's evocation of the Rapallo landscape anticipates the spatial frameworks of the main doctrine:
Mountains that shelter the bay from all but the south wind, bare brown branches of low vines and of tall trees blurring their outline as though with a soft mist; houses mirrored in an almost motionless sea: a verandahed gable a couple of miles away bringing to mind some Chinese painting. (AVB3)
The relationship between the gyres and cones at the heart of A Vision and the architecture of Yeats's thought may be construed in two diff erent ways, both suggested by this quotation: will the former provide sheltering solidity for the latter, like the mountains surrounding Rapallo, or will the forbidding abstraction of the gyres and related paraphernalia instead envelop and obscure the text's main contents “as though with a soft mist”? Later in “A Packet for Ezra Pound,” Yeats goes on to write of the intricate articulations of Pound's cantos, expressing a hope for clarity that also is relevant for his own work: “I may, now that I have recovered leisure, find that the mathematical structure, when taken up into imagination, is more than mathematical, that seemingly irrelevant details fit together into a single theme” (AVB5). But the later pages of the introduction are full of reservations about the “arbitrary, harsh, difficult symbolism” that lies at the text's heart (AVB 23). Yeats wistfully evokes the possibility of leaving behind the rigors of that symbolism once it is mastered: “We can (those hard symbolic bones under the skin) substitute for a treatise on logic the Divine Comedy, or some little song about a rose, or be content to live our thought” (AVB24).
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- Information
- W. B. Yeats's 'A Vision'Explications and Contexts, pp. 90 - 102Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2012