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
Shifting Sands: Dancing the Horoscope in the Vision Papers
- 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
Felkin told me thathe had seen a Dervish dance a horoscope. He went round and round on the sand and then circle to centre. He whirled round at the planets making round whorls in the sand by doing so. He then danced the connecting lines between planets and fell in trance. This is what I saw in dream or vision years ago.
W. B. Yeats, June 1909It was one of W. B. Yeats's idler fantasies that A Vision might found a new Irish heresy, as disciples studied it and applied its doctrines (L712). In fact, even as he wrote this, he knew how few readers his work could realistically expect. In A Vision A, he had confined his audience, somewhat pessimistically, to his “old fellow students” in the Golden Dawn, and suggested that “if they will master what is most abstract there and make it the foundation of their visions, a curtain may ring up on a new drama” (CW13 lv; AVA xii). Later, when he came to write A Vision B, he had resigned himself to finding a solitary satisfaction; the symbols, he said, helped him “to hold in a single thought reality and justice” (AVB25).
Generally speaking, readers have been content to allow Yeats his petty triumph. Literary critics continue to read the book as Yeats gave them license to do, as “metaphors for poetry” (AVB8). So far, the only people who have taken up the challenge of applying the doctrines of A Vision have been astrologers seeking to enlarge their art. I shall briefly examine some of these later, but in order properly to assess the use to which these epigones have put A Vision, one first needs to see some of the ways in which the Yeatses tried to integrate astrology into the system with a possible view towards extending astrology's capabilities.
There are few traces of traditional astrology in the finished work, especially as concerns the individual. Several passages extant in A Vision B mention how the natal horoscope can twist, or rather enrich and complicate, the natural character of a person's phase (AVB 153, 176).
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- Information
- W. B. Yeats's 'A Vision'Explications and Contexts, pp. 194 - 216Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2012