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
“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”
- 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
Introduction
While Yeats declared in the second edition of A Vision(1937) thathe was told by the instructors not to read philosophy until his book was completed, he nevertheless admitted that his failures in understanding the geometry and “distinctions upon which the coherence of the whole depended” were due to “ignorance of philosophy” (AVB19). Philosophy was of immense importance to him in organizing the movement of Faculties, Principles and Thirteenth Cone in the second edition, in accordance with existing ontological and epistemological ideas. The following study seeks to explain how his reading of philosophers as diverse as Plotinus and Oswald Spengler helped him to develop the Principles into a theory of perception and experience, to comprehend the mutual and dependent relation between incarnate and discarnate life, and to style the Great Year of the ancients as a theory of civilization akin to the views of ethnographers and anthropologists current to his age. Above all, however, it will be shown how Yeats's occultist background made him reinterpret the work of previous and contemporary scholars to become part of his own individual theory, a theory which melds classical conceptions of history with the contemporary.
I. Sequence and Eternity—The Role of Kant, Gentile,
Plotinus, Berkeley, McTaggart and Dunne
KANT AND GENTILE
Yeats's first use of modern philosophy in the 1937 edition of A Vision occurs with the appropriation of Giovanni Gentile's view that time is spatialization into the description of the symbolism of the gyres. Originally, as in the first edition, Yeats begins his exposition of the symbolism by discussing the relationship of time to space as a corollary of subjectivity to objectivity:
A line is a movement without extension, and so symbolical of time—subjectivity— Berkeley's stream of ideas—in Plotinus it is apparently “sensation”— and a plane cutting it at right angles is symbolical of space or objectivity. Line and plane are combined in a gyre which must expand or contract according to whether mind grows in objectivity or subjectivity.
The identification of time with subjectivity is probably as old as philosophy; all that we can touch or handle, and for the moment I mean no other objectivity, has shape or magnitude, whereas our thoughts and emotions have duration and quality, a thought recurs or is habitual, a lecture or a musical composition is measured upon the clock.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- W. B. Yeats's 'A Vision'Explications and Contexts, pp. 103 - 135Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2012