W. B. Yeats's 'A Vision'

Neil Mann works as an editor, translator, and teacher, and as an independent scholar, specializing in the works of W. B. Yeats, particularly his esoteric interests and A Vision. He is one of the readers who is simultaneously frustrated and fascinated by A Vision and the system that W. B. Yeats and his wife, George, elaborated through years of occult experiment and personal research. In 2002, he created the website YeatsVision.com as a resource for those seeking to understand this work better, and this book is the result of some forty years of engagement with A Vision, Yeats's work as a whole, and the background of nineteenth-century spirituality. Matthew Gibson is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Macau. He is the author of 'Yeats, Coleridge and the Romantic Sage' (Macmillan, 2000) and 'Dracula and the Eastern Question: British and French Vampire Narratives of the Nineteenth Century Near East' (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). He is presently completing a new monograph for the University of Wales Press, called 'Nineteenth Century European Gothic: Vampires, Doubles and the French Revolution'. Claire V. Nally is a Lecturer in Twentieth-Century English Literature at the University of Northumbria. She has published on Yeats in the 'Irish Studies Review' and the 'Canadian Review of Irish Studies', as well as writing the monograph 'Envisioning Ireland: W. B. Yeats’s Occult Nationalism' (Peter Lang, 2009).

• List of Figures and DiagramsPrefaceContributorsAcknowledgmentsAbbreviationsNeil Mann • “Everywhere that antinomy of the One and the Many”: The Foundations of A VisionRory Ryan • The Is and the Ought, the Knower and the Known: An Analysis of the Four Faculties in Yeats’s SystemGraham A. Dampier • “The Spiritual Intellect’s Great Work”: A Discussion of the Principles and A Vision’s Account of DeathCharles Armstrong • Ancient Frames: Classical Philosophy in Yeats’s A VisionMatthew Gibson • “Timeless and Spaceless”?—Yeats’s Search for Models of Interpretation in Post-Enlightenment Philosophy, Contemporary Anthropology andArt History, and the Effects of These Theories on “The Completed Symbol,” “The Soul in Judgment” and “The Great Year of the Ancients”Matthew DeForrest • W. B. Yeats’s A Vision: “Dove or Swan”Neil Mann • The Thirteenth ConeColin McDowell • Shifting Sands: Dancing the Horoscope in the Vision PapersWayne K. Chapman • “Metaphors for Poetry”: Concerning the Poems of A Vision and Certain Plays for DancersCatherine E. Paul • A Vision of Ezra PoundMargaret Mills Harper • Refl ected Voices, Double VisionsJanis Haswell • Yeats’s Vision and the FeminineC. Nicholas Serra • Esotericism and EscapeClaire V. Nally • The Political Occult: Revisiting Fascism, Yeats and A VisionGlossaryIndex