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:

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).