Less than four years after the elaborately conceited A Vision A was published, subtitled An Explanation of Life founded upon the Writings of Giraldus and upon Certain Doctrines Attributed to Kusta Ben Luka(to acknowledge sources of the poet's invention), Yeats's modus operandi was revealed in the beautifully written A Packet for Ezra Pound(Cuala Press, 1929; Wade 163), in the section entitled “Introduction to ‘The Great Wheel.’” Almost as soon as A Vision A had been committed irretrievably to the hands of its publisher, T. Werner Laurie, Yeats had begun rewriting it. As an apologia written by one contemporary poet to another, A Packet for Ezra Pound eventually accompanied the 1931 Stories of Michael Robartes and His Friends: An Extract from a Record Made by His Pupils (Wade 167; without the dance play The Resurrection) to become the formal entry way into the standard, remade, and amplified interior of A Vision B. The story of A Vision in the making, both A and B versions, provides multiple contexts for this study of the function of poetry in the service of those versions, as well as of poems and plays in verse coincident with the writing and rewriting of this difficult book.

Of course, the revelation of A Packet and A Vision B is that Mrs. Yeats and supposed spirit guides collaborated with the poet to develop a symbolic body of thought from a mode of “expression that unites the sleeping and waking mind” (AVB23), and to create “stylistic arrangements of experience” analogous to abstract modern art (AVB25). The “whole system,” he claimed, was “the creation of my wife's Daimon and of mine” (AVB 22), based on an assumption that “all the gains of man come from conflict with the opposite of his true being” (AVB13). He reported that the instructors had said (without a verbatim equivalent in the automatic script): “we have come to give you metaphors for poetry” (AVB8). Thanks to George Mills Harper's The Making of Yeats's “A Vision,” one is spared repeating much of his well-known account, particularly as a more recent study by Margaret Mills Harper is excerpted and available elsewhere in this anthology.