The Morphological Interaction of the Four Faculties in the Historical System of W. B. Yeats’s A Vision

William Butler Yeats’ elucidation of A Vision’s historical system in “Dove or Swan” represents the historical present as the reconciliation of past moments. The Four Faculties define history as the perpetual co-existence of historical periods and allow for a vision of historical development that always reflects on the past in order to make sense of the present. This essay argues that the interaction of the Faculties on the “line of coterminous periods” can be understood in terms of Spengler’s morphology of history as analytically analogous. The past influences the present, and can be said to constrain it, but it is the Will’s ability to reconcile the strife between the Tinctures that allows for novelty in this grand system of deterministic continuity. Previous discussions of the Yeats-Spengler connection have overlooked the importance of the Faculties and the four interacting periods of history, which this article only begins to address.

W. B. Yeats, Dream, Vision, and the Dead

This essay examines the role that dream and vision play in Yeats’s creative life and thought. It considers early Theosophical influences on his approach to the nature of dreams, and how the dream-state features in Yeats’s practice of the Golden Dawn’s Hermetic cabalism, drawing extensively on the unpublished diary that Yeats kept in the “PIAL Notebook” in 1908 and 1909. Yeats held dream to offer access to otherwise unperceived aspects of reality, and as his interest in contact with the dead and spiritualism increased in the 1910s, he theorized on the possibilities offered by the dream state, and the essay considers a series of lectures he gave on the subject. It then moves on to the place of dreams in the sessions of automatic writing that he carried out with his wife, George, and the work that these gave rise to, A Vision. Throughout, it considers how these concerns and interests fed into Yeats’s creativity and art.

Ghost, Medium, Criminal, Genius: Lombrosian Types in Yeats’s Art and Philosophy

This essay examines the role of Cesare Lombroso’s scientific and occult researches in shaping Yeats’s view of the mind, whether creative or criminal, in the mystical system of A Vision. Although the philosophical and aesthetic importance of Yeats’s mystical work has recently received serious attention, notably in W.B.Yeats’s A Vision: Explications and Contexts, the models used to recuperate and reassess this aspect of Yeats’s have not so far included minor contemporary figures like Lombroso, but have rather focused on classical, idealist, or political philosophy. Lombroso’s view of different human types, expressed most powerfully in his studies on genius and criminality, Criminal Man (1876) and The Man of Genius (1891), are important influences to consider for Yeats’s portrayal of representative psychological types in his typology of the phases of the Great Wheel. Beyond A Vision, Yeats’s reading of Lombroso connects with his interests in crime, eugenics, psychoanalysis, predestination, and the occult in his theater, for example, in his late play ‘Purgatory’, which is discussed in detail.

Yeats and Abstraction: From Berkeley to Zen

Yeats’s engaged in extended study of several major philosophers. Foremost of these was George Berkeley. In his recent book on Yeats and Berkeley, W. J. Mc Cormack wrote that “The advance by scholarship of Berkeley’s claims to the modern reader’s attention occurred in stated rejection of the Yeatsian exposition.” However, as this essay demonstrates, there is a strand of Berkeley scholarship, and a major strand at that, which is fully in accord with the thrust of Yeats’s interpretation. It was inaugurated by A. A. Luce, the person Mc Cormack credited with stating his rejection of Yeats’s interpretation. Yeats’s understanding of what “realism” entailed was not a simple matter, just as it was not a simple matter for Berkeley. In the letters to T. Sturge Moore, Yeats debated at length what the terms “realist” and “idealist” meant, adducing Alfred North Whitehead’s attack on abstraction in Science and the Modern World, a book which utilized Berkeley heavily. Yeats’s wish was to “see things as they are,” without abstraction, and this ambition, he realised, was only fitfully to be attained, and in order to articulate this he drew also from descriptions of Zen Buddhists who had attained enlightenment.

Yeats, the Great Year, and Pierre Duhem

This essay deals with the intricacies of Yeats’s development of the concept of the Great Year—one of the earliest cyclical theories of history—in the system of A Vision. After considering the workings of the gyres and Faculties, it examines how the Yeatses’ developed a “World Diagram” of a 26,000-year “cycle” in the Automatic Script, divided into twelve parts, which provides a basis for a “Great Year” with alternately primary and antithetical religious epochs. It discusses Yeats’s use of sources in Hastings’s Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics and works on early calendars and astronomy in framing the great year in A Vision (1925), as well as the mistakes he made therein. The piece then considers the role played by Sepharial’s Hebrew Astrology and Hindu sources in Yeats’s search for new analogues when preparing for the new edition. Finally, the essay examines the crucial role played by Pierre Duhem and Yeats’s specific reasons for using mainly his book on Le Système du monde (“The System of the World”) in the final articulation of the idea.

“Something Intended, Complete”: Major Work on Yeats Past, Present, and Yet to Come

This piece is based on a plenary lecture on the situation in Yeats scholarship delivered in 2013, updated to survey the “state of Yeats” at the sesquicentennial of his birth in 2015. It then shows how work in progress on W. B. Yeats’s Robartes-Aherne Writings recently led to an unexpected discovery of an unknown precursor to “The Phases of the Moon”—one in which Yeats followed the example of Walter Savage Landor by putting himself into an “imaginary conversation” with Aherne. Aherne is one of two creatures from his fiction of the 1890s resurrected in 1918 as spokesmen for the mystical philosophy he had begun to assemble, with his wife as medium, for A Vision (1925, 1937). As “The Phases of the Moon” figures large as an introductory movement to both editions of that book, this essay prefaces the others in this volume.

“Born Anew”: W. B. Yeats’s “Eastern” Turn in the 1930s

This essay looks at how Yeats consistently associated what he conceived of as “Eastern” thought with themes of rebirth and fresh beginnings, as well as a form of disinterestedness. This nexus is evident not only in his early poetry adopting Indian personae and themes, but also in the introductions he wrote in the 1930s for works by Shri Purohit Swami. In his introduction to An Indian Monk: His Life and Adventures (1932), Yeats claimed that much of the Western tradition actually stems from the East: “We have borrowed directly from the East and selected for admiration or repetition everything in our own past that is least European, as though groping backward towards our common mother.”This essay looks at doctrinal borrowings and overlap – both in the prose and poetry – with special emphasis on how Yeats’s relations with the East are intertwined with his readings of Hegel and Romanticism.

Introduction

In this piece, the editors justify both the title of the book and the reason for the particular stance which the book takes. Recalling G. M. Harper’s seminal collection of essays from 1975, Yeats and the Occult, the editors note the rise of the importance of criticism which examines Yeats’s interactions with philosophy, the growth in the understanding of A Vision since the 1980s, and recent work on Yeats’s purely occult studies. The introduction also stressed the balance between Western and Eastern influences explored by the book’s contributors, and furthermore argues for the importance of understanding Yeats’s more esoteric side for improved interpretation of his poetry and plays, arguing against approaches that discount the content and background of poetic creation.