The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Volume XIII: A Vision: The Original 1925 Version

William Butler Yeats

Simon and Schuster, 2008 - Literary Collections - 384 pages

The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume XIII: A Vision is part of a fourteen-volume series under the general editorship of eminent Yeats scholar George Bornstein and formerly the late Richard J. Finneran and George Mills Harper. One of the strangest works of literary modernism, A Vision is Yeats's greatest occult work.

Edited by Yeats scholars Catherine E. Paul and Margaret Mills Harper, the volume presents the "system" of philosophy, psychology, history, and the life of the soul that Yeats and his wife George (née Hyde Lees) received and created by means of mediumistic experiments from 1917 through the early 1920s. Yeats obsessively revised the book, and the revised 1937 version is much more widely available than its predecessor. The original 1925 version of A Vision, poetic, unpolished, masked in fiction, and close to the excitement of the automatic writing that the Yeatses believed to be its supernatural origin, is presented here in a scholarly edition for the first time.

The text, minimally corrected to retain the sense of the original, is extensively annotated, with particular attention paid to the relationship between the published book and its complex genetic materials. Indispensable to an understanding of the poet's late work and entrancing on its own merit, A Vision aims to be, all at once, a work of theoretical history, an esoteric philosophy, an aesthetic symbology, a psychological schema, and a sacred book. It is as difficult as it is essential reading for any student of Yeats.

What people are saying

A vision (1925)

User Review  - Not Available - Book Verdict

Yeats was a leading figure of the Irish Literary Revival and remains one of the finest modernist poets in the English language. Scribner is publishing his Collected Works in 14 volumes. This 13th ...

Contents

• Editors Preface and Acknowledgments: xi
• Illustrations: xix
• Dedication: liii
• Book IWhat the Caliph Partly Learned: 1
• Book IIWhat the Caliph Refused to Learn: 95
• Textual Matters and Notes: 213
• Corrections to the Yeatses Copies of A Vision 1925: 339
• Emendations to the CopyText: 353
• EndofLine Word Division in the CopyText: 365

Popular passages

Page 7 - Reformer, merchant, statesman, learned man, Dutiful husband, honest wife by turn, Cradle upon cradle, and all in flight and all Deformed, because there is no deformity But saves us from a dream.‎

Page 107 - Who nails him down upon a rock, Catches his shrieks in cups of gold. She binds iron thorns around his head, She pierces both his hands and feet, She cuts his heart out at his side To make it feel both cold and heat. Her fingers number every Nerve, Just as a Miser counts his gold; She lives upon his shrieks and cries, And she grows young as he grows old.‎

Page 261 - When I was writing The Shadow of the Glen some years ago, I got more aid than any learning could have given me from a chink in the floor of the old Wicklow house where I was staying, that let me hear what was being said by the servant girls in the kitchen.‎

Page 108 - The bread & wine of her sweet smile The wild game of her roving Eye Does him to Infancy beguile For as he eats...‎

Page 210 - He had much industry at setting out, Much boisterous courage, before loneliness Had driven him crazed; For meditations upon unknown thought Make human intercourse grow less and less; They are neither paid nor praised. But he'd object to the host, The glass because my glass; A ghost-lover he was And may have grown more arrogant being a ghost. So that his elements have grown so fine The fume of muscatel Can give his sharpened palate ecstasy No living man can drink from the whole wine.‎

Page 247 - MY God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring...‎

Page 209 - Two thoughts were so mixed up I could not tell Whether of her or God he thought the most, But think that his mind's eye, When upward turned, on one sole image fell; And that a slight companionable ghost, Wild with divinity, Had so lit up the whole Immense miraculous house The Bible promised us, It seemed a gold-fish swimming in a bowl.‎

Page 59 - Now contemplation and desire, united into one, inhabit a world where every beloved image has bodily form, and every bodily form is loved. This love knows nothing of desire, for desire implies effort, and though there is still separation from the loved object, love accepts the separation as necessary to its own existence.‎

Page 210 - For in my first hard springtime we were friends, Although of late estranged. I thought him half a lunatic, half knave, And told him so, but friendship never ends...‎

About the author

William Butler Yeats is generally considered to be Ireland's greatest poet, living or dead, and one of the most important literary figures of the twentieth century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923.

Catherine E. Paul is Associate Professor of English at Clemson University. She is the author of Poetry in the Museums of Modernism: Yeats, Pound, Moore, Stein and of numerous articles relating to modernist studies.

Margaret Mills Harper, a coeditor of Yeat's "Vision" Papers (volumes 3 and 4), is the author of Wisdom of Two: The Spiritual and Literary Collaboration of George and W.B. Yeats, The Aristocracy of Art in Joyce and Wolfe, and numerous articles on Yeats, Irish literature, and literary modernism. She is Professor of English and Women's Studies at Georgia State University.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Volume XIII: A Vision: The Original 1925 Version; Volume 13 of COLLECTED WORKS OF W B YEATS, William Butler Yeats; Volume 13 of Opere, W. B. Yeats; Volume 13 of Works, William Butler Yeats
• Author: William Butler Yeats
• Editors: Catherine E. Paul, Margaret Mills Harper
• Edition: illustrated, reprint, annotated
• Publisher: Simon and Schuster, 2008
• ISBN: 0684807335, 9780684807331
• Length: 384 pages
• Subjects: Body, Mind & Spirit / Occultism; Literary Collections / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; Literary Criticism / General; Poetry / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh