The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

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William Butler Yeats, whom many consider this century's greatest poet, began as a bard of the Celtic Twilight, reviving legends and Rosicrucian symbols. By the early 1900s, however, he was moving away from plush romanticism, his verse morphing from the incantatory rhythms of "I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree" into lyrics "as cold and passionate as the dawn." At every stage, however, Yeats plays a multiplicity of poetic roles. There is the romantic lover of "When You Are Old" and "A Poet to His Beloved" ("I bring you with reverent Hands / The books of my numberless dreams..."). And there are the far more bitter celebrations of Maud Gonne, who never accepted his love and engaged in too much politicking for his taste: "Why should I blame her that she filled my days / With misery, or that she would of late / Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways, / Or hurled the little streets upon the great, / Had they but courage equal to desire?" There is also the poet of conscience--and confrontation. His 1931 "Remorse for Intemperate Speech" ends: "Out of Ireland have we come. / Great hatred, little room, / Maimed us at the start. / I carried from my mother's womb / A fanatic heart."

Yeats was to explore several more sides of himself, and of Ireland, before his Last Poems of 1938-39. Many are difficult, some snobbish, others occult and spiritualist. As Brendan Kennelly writes, Yeats "produces both poppycock and sublimity in verse, sometimes closely together." On the other hand, many prophetic masterworks are poppycock-free--for example, "The Second Coming" ("Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...") and such inquiries into inspiration as "Among School Children" ("O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?"). And at his best, Yeats extends the meaning of love poetry beyond the obviously romantic: love becomes a revolutionary emotion, attaching the poet to friends, history, and the passionate life of the mind. --Kerry Fried

Book Description

The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats includes all of the poems authorized by Yeats for inclusion in his standard canon. Breathtaking in range, it encompasses the entire arc of his career, from luminous reworkings of ancient Irish myths and legends to passionate meditations on the demands and rewards of youth and old age, from exquisite, occasionally whimsical songs of love, nature, and art to somber and angry poems of life in a nation torn by war and uprising. In observing the development of rich and recurring images and themes over the course of his body of work, we can trace the quest of this century's greatest poet to unite intellect and artistry in a single magnificent vision.

Revised and corrected, this edition includes Yeats's own notes on his poetry, complemented by explanatory notes from esteemed Yeats scholar Richard J. Finneran. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats is the most comprehensive edition of one of the world's most beloved poets available in paperback.

Customer Reviews:

Awesome Collection.......2006-07-10

This book contains all of Yeat's published poetry and I believe alot of his dramatic writings. Yeat's has to be one of the best english poets of all time. I put him up next to Shakespeare. His poems are full of mystery, and alot of romance and polotics. It's really great stuff.

Yeats, one of the greatest.......2006-05-21

The short space that is offered here for reviews is nowhere near sufficient to review the life's works of one of Ireland's and the world's greatest poets. However I must at least try to describe the beauty that is the poetry of William Butler Yeats.

Perhaps Yeats is at his finest when reflecting on love, usually unrequited. Yeats manages to produce love poems that have a genuine passion that is surprisingly rare in poetry, specifically that of the modern day. Perhaps Yeats is representative of a type of romanticism that is moribund in modern literature, this is surely a tragic shame.

However Yeats' examination of the human condition is not restricted to the romantic. In 'What Then?', Yeats examines the frantic and vain human search for an ultimate meaning or significance. He manages this in a far more poetic and succinct way than many poets who have gone before him. In 'A Man Young and Old', Yeats runs us through the gamut of human experience in a wonderous,yet harrowing manner.

These are but a handful of examples of this beautiful poetry that demands to be read by any lover of literature.

Great poet, great work, amazing compilation!.......2005-11-15

A great compilation of Yeats works, while other compilations have excellent notes and essays regarding his works this one has many of his poems (and series of poems) all in one book. An outstanding book to own, beautifully compiled in this soft cover book (which has surprisingly held up quite well against years of battering as I carry it with me from time to time).

magnificent poems on cheap paper.......2005-10-24

I trust it goes without saying that William Butler Yeats is one of the greatest English-language poets of all time. This volume contains his entire body of verse, and is a magnificent treasure trove that will delight and stun the reader for decades.

I give two stars to the cheap materials used to create this masterpiece. I literally had this book out of the Amazon box for a matter of hours before the cover started to curl of its own accord, as though possessed by a poetry-hating demon. The paper is low-grade and coarse, with an unappealing brownish tinge.

Despite my love of Yeats, I find that I unconsciously tend to keep this book on the shelf just to keep its ugliness out of site, and I am by no means an aesthete. If you can find a slightly nicer version, it is worth paying a little extra.

Hauntingingly beautiful, ageless poetry!.......2005-09-12

I had never taken the time to enjoy Yeats' poetry before although I had read single poems on occasion. It is an experience not to be missed to sit and read his better-known poetry all in one sitting. The beauty of the words and imagery is then much more apparent. Yeats writes a lot about mysticism and the occult, and ancient Ireland comes alive as you read his beautiful words. I read that Yeats, although he wrote poetry all his life, would only put down three or four lines per day. He was such a perfectionist that he wanted to make sure that his lines were perfect. It seems such a tedious procss, but what beautiful words he wrote! His time could not have been better spent than in creating three beautiful and perfect lines per day. His poetry changed as he aged, but it kept getting better and better. His earlier poetry portrayed a lot about faeries and the dream world the he lived in himself when he was young. The lyrics were tuneful and romantic. As he aged, the romanticism changed considerably and his poems were harder-driven with very deep messages underneath the words. These are truly masterpieces, and Yeats comes by his reputation as one of the greatest English writing poets of all time.

The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Volume X: Later Articles and Reviews : Uncollected Articles, Reviews, and Radio Broadcasts Written After 1900

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The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Volume X: Later Articles and Reviews : Uncollected Articles, Reviews, and Radio Broadcasts Written After 1900
William Butler Yeats
Manufacturer: Scribner
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0684807270

Book Description

The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume X: Later Articles and Reviews is part of a fourteen-volume series under the general editorship of eminent Yeats scholars Richard J. Finneran and George Mills Harper. This first complete edition includes virtually all of the Nobel laureate's published work, in authoritative texts and with extensive explanatory notes.

Later Articles and Reviews consists of fifty-four prose pieces published between 1900 and Yeats's death in January 1939 and benefits from the notes and emendations of Yeats scholar Colton Johnson. The pieces collected here are occasional, and they reflect the many interests and engagements of Yeats in his maturity. No longer a reviewer or polemicist, Yeats is an international figure: a senator in the fledgling Irish state, a defining modern poet, a distinguished essayist. And here we have him writing -- with grace, wit, and passion -- on the state of Ireland in the world, on Irish language and Irish literature, on his artistic contemporaries, on the Abbey Theater, on divorce, on censorship, on his evolution as a poet and dramatist, on his own poetry.

Volume X also includes texts of ten radio programs Yeats broadcast between 1931 and 1937. This is not only the first collection but also the first printing of Yeats's radio work, which constitutes the largest previously uncollected body of his writings and possibly the most important to remain largely unstudied. Carefully assembled from manuscripts, typescripts, broadcast scripts, and fragmentary recordings, the programs range from a scripted interview on contemporary issues to elaborate stagings of his own and others' poetry. One of the radio programs is presented in an appendix complete with the commissioned musical score that set Yeats's poetry to music, Yeats's own emendations on the BBC broadcast script, and the diacritical notes with which the broadcast reader indicated Yeats's interpretive instructions.

Here, then, is seasoned Yeats, writing and speaking vigorously and with keen personal insight about the modern age and his place in it.

Customer Reviews:

A Poet's Vision.......2002-02-05

Recently stopping at Shannon Duty-free, I found this beautiful
book. The words of Yeats and the photos of Le Garsmeur combine
to transport you to another time, another place...and where else
would you rather be than exploring that Emerald Isle with its
famous bard? Turn off the TV; put some Irish music on the stereo;
pour a glass of red wine and sail away. I guarantee you'll be
planning another trip to Ireland after this experience.

Yeats's Poetry, Drama, and Prose (Norton Critical Editions)

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Another fine edition of the works of a great poet
Very nice compilation, especially regarding prose!

Yeats's Poetry, Drama, and Prose (Norton Critical Editions)
William Butler Yeats
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0393974979

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No other series of classic texts achieves the editorial standard of the Norton Critical Editions. Each volume combines the most authoritative text available with contextual and critical materials that bring the work to life for students. Careful editing, first-rate translation, thorough explanatory annotations, chronologies, and selected bibliographies make each text accessible to students while encouraging in-depth study. Each volume in the series is printed on acid-free paper, and every text remains in print. Norton Critical Editions are the choice of excellence for scholarship for students at more than 2,500 colleges and universities worldwide.

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Another fine edition of the works of a great poet.......2006-01-09

There are by this time many collections of the works of Yeats, and this is one of the good ones. Aside from containing the major plays and poems it has critical essays by contemporaries of Yeats and important critical voices of our own time, such as Helen Vendler, Harold Bloom, and the poet Seamus Heaney.
As for the work itself, however historically important the plays, and however of curiosity value 'The Autobiography' and other prose writings the Yeats that lives is in the poetry.
It is that lyrical greatness the power of song manifested early on which later was deepened into even greater poetry. From 'Innisfee' and "Song of the Wandering Aengus ' to the poetry of 'Byzantium' and 'Among the Schoolchildren'.
The great lines, a small sample of which follows"

And we will wander hand in hand / through hollow lands and hily lands/
And pluck till time and times are done/ The silver apples of the moon/ The golden apples of the sun/

"We must lie down where all the ladders start/ in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart."

" The best lack all conviction, and the worst are full of passionate intensity"

"But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you/ and loved the sorrows of your changing face."

Very nice compilation, especially regarding prose!.......2005-11-15

This is an excellent book, produced with excellent quality. While it isn't the most complete anthology in the world as far as his poems are concerned (for this reason The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Volume I by Finneran is a much better choice), the prose found within the book are excellent. Another thing worth noting is the lengthily essays by other well known authors which tend to either be criticisms or praise for Mr. Yeats, truly magnificent in that department! Again, the focus of this anthology is much different from other supremely divine works (such as the one previously mentioned).

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Biography and Literary criticism as one
Biograph Master
Admirable, but not Perfect
Casting a Cold Eye

Yeats: The Man and the Masks
Richard Ellmann
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0393008592

Book Description

The definitive biography of William Butler Yeats. The most influential poet of his age, Yeats eluded the grasp of many who sought to explain him. In this classic critical examination of the poet, Richard Ellmann strips away the masks of his subject: occultist, senator of the Irish Free State, libidinous old man, and Nobel Prize winner.

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Biography and Literary criticism as one.......2006-01-17

Ellmann was both a masterful biographer and first- rate literary critic. In this early book he writes an excellent account of the life of Yeats, and combines with an overall analysis of Yeats' literary development. He probes deeply into the symbolic and mythic meaning of Yeats' poetry and provides for the lay-reader a key to this often complex poetry's, understanding.
Ellmann would go on later to write his much larger masterpiece , the biography of Joyce- but here as a young man he shows a surprising depth of understanding of the full range of Yeats' problems through his remarkable creative, and not easy personal, life.

Biograph Master.......2003-04-12

Ellmann was only 30 when he published this in 1948, less than 10 years after Yeats's death; he was the first biographer to see Yeats's papers in their chaotic entirety. What an astounding job! You'd think this would read like a warm-up for his later magisterial biographies of Joyce and Wilde, but "The Man and the Masks" holds its own against those works, giving a sensitive, economical portrait of an unusually fractured poet.

Ellmann stresses Yeats's life-long effort to forge his thoughts into a unified system in the teeth of inbred skepticism, shyness and vacillation. He draws a discreet curtain over the sexual parts of Yeats's life but compensates with a keen understanding of the courage it took for this diffident, ill-read & dreamy man to make himself by fits and starts into a modern poet. My favorite parts of the book were the sections where Ellmann compares earlier drafts of the poems to the printed versions, showing just how hard-won Yeats's genius was. He tempers a critical eye towards Yeats's excesses--the wild mysticism, the Fascist sympathies, the arrogant public demeanor--with an understanding of Yeats's deep need for masks. According to Ellmann, Yeats's theories and systems weren't dogmas so much as postures he assumed to fulfill his own desire for a certainty of belief he never quite attained. Ellmann shows how that drive shaped the poems and ultimately rescued them from the deadness certitude would have brought. A classic study and an excellent starting-point for further reading on Yeats's life and work.

Admirable, but not Perfect.......2000-06-24

Though I have the greatest admiration for Ellman, I must say that this critical biography of Yeats has a few too many blindspots, is too vague and shapeless in its outline of Yeats' life, to satisfy entirely. Roy Foster's two-volume account is ultimately preferable because far more complete.

Casting a Cold Eye.......2000-06-06

THE definitive, open, and engaging study of the man T.S.Eliot declared the greatest poet of his age. Richard Ellman is no longer with us, but this is a monument of Yeats biography and criticism, the book which all subsequent biographers try to rewrite. The text itself, written as it was amidst a flurry of uncollected papers in the forties and with the co-operation of W.B.'s widow George, is understandably reticent about some elements of the poet's private life, notably his early lovers and extra-marital affairs; but the introduction printed with this new edition fills in many of the blanks, and gives the reasoning for Ellman's assertion that Yeats's affair with Maud Gonne was indeed finally consummated, confirming a suspicion hitherto based only on ambiguous references in letters and the poem 'A Man Young and Old'. Most of all, however, it is Ellman's sensitive and insightful treatment of Yeats's at once shy and self-possessed nature that impresses; the writer will never have a more accurate critic, and the man never a more sincere and biting appraisal of his contradictions. This is the place to start if you are interested in Yeats: you may not find the book or the man that you were expecting, an easy dreamy life of lost women and lake isles, but the portrait is truer, and the artistic genius more clearly delineated than in any other book on the subject, and there have been many. Ellman went on to write the definitive lives of James Joyce and Oscar Wilde; that his first essay in literary biography stands comparison with these is its own testament.

The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Volume IV: Early Essays (Collected Works of W B Yeats)

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The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Volume IV: Early Essays (Collected Works of W B Yeats)
William Butler Yeats , Richard J. Finneran , and George Bornstein
Manufacturer: Scribner
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0684807297

Book Description

The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume IV: Early Essays is part of a fourteen-volume series under the general editorship of eminent Yeats scholars George Bornstein and George Mills Harper. These volumes include virtually all of the Nobel laureate's published work, in authoritative texts with extensive explanatory notes.

Early Essays, edited by the internationally esteemed Yeats scholars George Bornstein and the late Richard J. Finneran, includes the contents of the two most important collections of Yeats's critical prose, Ideas of Good and Evil(1903) and The Cutting of an Agate(1912, 1919). Among the seminal essays are considerations of Blake, Shakespeare, Shelley, Spenser, and Synge, as well as an extended discussion of the Japanese Noh theatre. The first scholarly edition of these materials, Early Essays offers a corrected text and detailed annotation of all allusions. Several appendices gather materials from early printings which were later excluded, as well as illuminating black-and-white illustrations.

Early Essays is an essential sourcebook for understanding Yeats's career as both writer and literary critic, and for the development of modern poetry and criticism. Here, Yeats works out many of his key ideas on poetry, politics, and the theater. He gives interpretations of writers critical to his development and presents a compelling vision of Ireland and the modern world during the last decade of the nineteenth century and first two decades of the twentieth. As T. S. Eliot remarked, Yeats "was one of those few whose history is the history of their own time, who are a part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them." This volume displays a crucial part of that history.

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There are several biographies of the great Irish poet to choose from, and the one you'll prefer depends on how much biography you want. Subtitled "The Apprentice Mage, 1865-1914," this is the one for completists (though they'll have to wait for Volume Two to get through Yeats's death in 1939). The author, a noted Irish historian, renders Yeats's life almost day to day, giving a particularly lively sense of the helter-skelter nature of his early years and a nice depiction of his tumultuous engagement with the Abbey Theatre.

Book Description

In the first authorized biography of W. B. Yeats for over fifty years, Roy Foster sheds new light on one of the most complex and fascinating lives of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Working from a great archive of personal and contemporary material, he dramatically alters traditional perceptions to illuminate the poet's family history, relationships, politics and art. From a childhood inheritance of declasse Irish Protestantism with strong nationalist sympathies, and an exceptional and talented family background, the narrative charts Yeats's development into an original and outstanding poet. It ends in his fiftieth year with the controversies and disillusionment affecting his personal and public life at the time of the First World War. A bohemian life of uncertain finances, love-affairs, avant-garde friends and experiments with drugs and occultism prefaces his attempt to unite politics with high culture and his creation of an Irish national theatre. Constantly shifting between Dublin, Coole Park and London, with forays to America and Paris, ruthlessly constructing a public life as well as a creative reputation, Yeats's genius attracted admirers and enemies with equal passion. His story intersects with those of an engrossing cast of characters including Lady Gregory, J. M. Synge, George Moore, `AE', Ezra Pound and above all Maud Gonne - an influence eternally re-created `like the phoenix', affecting almost everything he did. The search for supernatural wisdom forms a constant thread, traced through Yeats's occult notebooks and closely related to the insecurities of his personal life. The Apprentice Mage charts the growth of a poet's mind and of an astonishing personality, both of which were instrumental in the formation of a new and radicalized Irish nationalist identity.

Customer Reviews:

Informative biography of a complicated man.......2004-03-01

William Butler Yeats offers a life of contradictions. Born in Dublin to a middle-class Protestant family, Yeats went on to become one of the premier poets of the twentieth century. As a writer and member of the Irish literary community, he also helped to forge Irish national identity through his words and his deeds. In this biography, the first of two volumes, Roy Foster offers an account of Yeats' development into one of the leading figures of the Irish literary scene.

This is not an easy book. Foster recounts Yeats' life in what is sometimes excruciating detail, covering every movement and literary battle the poet undertakes. Moreover, as he does so he assumes the reader's familiarity with both the background of late nineteenth century Ireland and the members of the Irish literary community. People appear in his narrative with little introduction, creating a confusing jumble of names that limits the appreciation of their role in Yeats' life.

Such problems aside, this is a first-rate biography. Foster does a great job examining Yeats' life, in a text that while long is never dense. His coverage of Yeats' occult interests is particularly good, as is that of the poet's involvement in nationalist causes - both integral aspects of his poetry. Foster's argument that Yeats' involvement in the mystical was a reaction to the declining position of Protestants in Ireland, an effort to cope with the sense of dislocation by asserting psychic control, is a compelling one that helps to fit more of his poetry into its contemporary context. Foster helps this process; while he asserts that his biography is about what Yeats did rather than what the poet wrote he does offer a perceptive commentary on aspects of Yeats' work, which helps us better appreciate the connection between the man and his writings. Thanks to this, we have a book that is essential for understanding such a complicated literary figure and the role he played in his times.

The Lighthouse and the Anteater.......2003-05-02

For the first 100 pages or so, this book had me completely. Roy Foster writes with elegant brio and has a historian's eye for the wider events and contexts that shaped Yeats's early years. Where previous biographers like Ellman take a sort of lighthouse approach to their subject, treating the passions and conflicts of Yeats's day as fuel for the poetry that was destined to outshine them, Foster is more like an anteater, eagerly snuffling up the everyday bits of information that give the flavor of Yeats's multifaceted life as he actually lived it, before his later fame and incessant revisions smoothed it into a pattern.

After a while though, the book tends to bury Yeats in a mass of trivia that include everything from the menu at one of his literary dinners to the prices he charged for his lectures. This level of detail could be enlightening if Foster stopped for breath more often to tell us why these things are important. Too often though he keeps his head firmly down with the ants, cataloging the day-to-day intrigues of a very complicated life without linking them to any kind of larger interpretation of Yeats's personality or development. Instead, Foster spends his 500+ pages introducing new names at the rate of one or so per page, most of them disappearing by the end of the chapter never to be heard from again. We get the intrigues of various Irish nationalist factions, potted bios of minor figures on the Dublin and London art scenes, humorous sketches of Yeats's fellow-travellers in his sundry mystical societies. It was hard to see Yeats after a while with all these minor figures crowding the stage.

If Foster does have an interpretation of his own, as far as I can tell it's a revisionist one. Where Ellman or Jeffaries saw Yeats's life as a drama of painful self-creation, Foster sends to see an ambitious man on the make, an aggressive networker who wasn't beyond bending the truth if it helped his own advancement. Even his life-long passion for Maud Gonne, one of the key sources of his poetry, was, according to Foster, in part a self-conscious realization that a great poet needed a great passion to write about. In trying to bring Yeats back down to earth, I think Foster overcompensates by making him more canny and worldly than the sexual naivete, table rapping, faery talk and aesthetic posturing of these years suggest. Worst of all, Foster shows almost no interest in Yeats's poetry, the reason we're reading the biography in the first place. I put down the book admiring Foster's energy and mastery of such a huge anthill of facts, but I couldn't shake the feeling that a lot less would have told us a lot more.

Surprises!.......2001-07-04

This is loaded with surprise after surprise. Foster's insights into the poetry, through historical and social readings, are often revelatory. My only complaint is that many of the tales he tells tend to have the same emotional architecture due to a descirptive repetition: this makes it a little monotonous at times. But this is a quibble. This book is great. When is Vol. 2 going to be published?

The Definitive Yeats Biography.......1999-12-12

R.F. Foster's two-volume biography (second volume to come in 2000) is a model of articulate and knowledgable scholarship, arguably comparable to the great biographies of Joyce and Wilde written by Richard Ellman. Foster's work leaves nothing to be desired. It easily excels previous Yeats biographies written by Cootes, Jeffares, etc.

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William Butler Yeats' A Vision Summarized
Esoteric Yeats
A Vision

A Vision (Papermacs)
W.B. Yeats
Manufacturer: Papermac
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0333309804

Product Description

Unabridged audiobook in MP3 format.

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William Butler Yeats' A Vision Summarized.......2007-08-20

One of the most remarkable channeled documents of the past century is Nobel Prize-winning poet William Butler Yeats' A Vision. Yeats explains how he obtained A Vision as follows: "On the afternoon of October 24th, 1917, four days after my marriage, my wife surprised me by attempting automatic writing. What came in disjointed sentences, in almost illegible writing, was so exciting, sometimes so profound, that I persuaded her to give an hour or two day after day to the unknown writer, and after some half dozen such hours offered to spend what remained of life explaining and piecing together those scattered sentences." Yeats spent the next twenty years on this project, and in the end produced a masterpiece which contains an all-encompassing system of symbolism which has geometrical, astrological, psychological, metaphysical, and historical components - a model of the entire universe: "all thought, all history and the difference between man and man."

Yeats' theory of reincarnation as described in A Vision represents a novel view of the subject: that reincarnation does not take place within a matrix of linear time. It's not as if e.g. you had a life in ancient Greece and then you died; then you had a life in ancient Rome and then you died; then you had a life in the Middle Ages and then you died; etc. Rather, all of your past and future lives are going on at once, in an eternal Now moment. The linearity of time is an illusion, a falsehood, which Yeats termed Deception (and which Eastern philosophers term maya or samsara). It is this Deception, the false appearance that there is such a thing as an objective reality out there which is unfolding in linear time, which animates the striving of all sentient beings and keeps the wheel of reincarnation, of life and death and rebirth, turning.

The basic geometrical symbol in A Vision represents the unraveling of time as two interpenetrating, rotating, heliacal cones (which Yeats terms gyres): "Incarnations and judgment alike implied cones or gyres, one within the other, turning in opposite directions." In Yeats' symbolism one of the rotating gyres represents Concord, or unity; the other gyre represents Discord, or desire. "Without this continual Discord through Deception there would be no conscience, no activity; Deception is a technical term of my teachers and may be substituted for `desire'". What is being symbolized by the two gyres is the driving force behind reincarnation - the descent into matter (Discord) and the return to spirit (Concord). By "Deception" Yeats means striving. Striving is not striving after something; desire is not desire for something. Rather striving and desire are movements, motions, for their own sake. It isn't really the objects of their desire which sentient beings seek but rather the hunger, the state of desire itself. The objects of desire - thought forms, the phenomenal world - don't have any objective existence. This is what is meant by the statement that "reality is but a symbol"; and this is the Deception. Another way of saying this is that waking consciousness is but a more highly evolved form of dreaming, but it is no more real than dreaming. The belief that what we do when we are awake is somehow "real" - more real than what we do when we are dreaming - is what motivates all our striving and traps us in the revolving wheel of birth and death.

In Yeats' symbolism the cone or gyre of Discord (which he also terms the "Antithetical tincture") is our imaginative, striving side, which separates man from man. The cone of Concord (also termed the "Primary tincture") is our detached, intellectual side, which brings us back to the mass where we began. That is to say, we need sobriety and detachment to truly perceive the nature of the universe. "The antithetical tincture is emotional and aesthetic whereas the primary tincture is reasonable and moral. Within these cones move what are called the Four Faculties: Will and Mask, Creative Mind and Body of Fate."

The Four Faculties are actually four levels of human memory. It has been pointed out that all of our past and future lives are occurring at once in an eternal Now moment. By "all of our past and future lives" is meant the memories which go all the way back to the very first cell from which all life on earth is descended. All life on earth evolved from one single, primordial cell; and one way of looking at it is that all life on earth is therefore one single organism, which merely has different ramifications. Each of us individual sentient beings on this earth are like different fingers on the same hand. And each of us individuals has a body of memory that goes all the way back to the beginning: one-celled memory, multi-celled memory, animal memory, vertebrate memory, mammalian memory, and human memory. All of this memory presses upon and shapes the present moment. Memory is the weight of the universe on the shoulders of each individual sentient being - the record of every decision that's ever been made. Of course, some lines of memory are more important to a given individual than others; some have a more direct bearing upon a given moment or a given lifetime than others. But it must be borne in mind that the entirety is weighing upon each individual human, animal, plant, cell all the time. And each individual organism selects a piece of the whole to emphasize, and that piece is everything the organism considers this lifetime. This is what Yeats termed the Faculty of Will - the memories of this present lifetime.

"The stage-manager, or Daimon, offers his actor an inherited scenario, the Body of Fate, and a Mask or role as unlike as possible to his natural ego or Will, and leaves him to improvise through his Creative Mind the dialogue and details of the plot." Daimon is Yeats' term for the person in his or her totality, "the ultimate self of man", or the Oversoul which is the sum of all of the person's lives in different realities. The human part of this totality, or memory inventory, can be arbitrarily divided into four categories, and these are the Four Faculties (excluded from this analysis is the part of memory which is above the human level - i.e. primate memory and mammal memory and vertebrate memory etc. all the way back).

Will is the socially conditioned person, the robot which is wholly governed by routines and knee-jerk responses; which has given up personal feelings and choices to do what is expected by others and to submit to the daily grind. Will is the Daimon's level of approval and approbation, of reflection in the eyes of other people. The 28 lunar phase types refer specifically to Will: the socialized person, the one who has asked no questions but has bought into society's ready-made solutions willy-nilly. Will manifests through a conviction of rectitude; hence it is completely self-centered and self-important. Decisions made on the level of Will usually do not take into account other people's viewpoints, or much sense of responsibility for ultimate consequences.

Body of Fate is the sum total of this present lifetime together with all of its probable realities. Probable realities are parallel lifetimes which branch off from this one at each point where a decision, large or small, is made. We believe that all we are is Will - a linear personal history, a series of events which began at birth and led up to where we are right now; and from here we will have a linear future. And there is one "me" who has had this personal history and who is going to have this personal future. In fact, there are infinite number of "me's" who had an infinite number of probable pasts, and there are an infinite number of "me's" who will have an infinite number of possible futures. The probable reality level of memory is Body of Fate. In everyday life Body of Fate is the person's wistful longings, ideals, and romance; his or her daydreams and fantasies. Body of Fate refers to openness to new experience, willingness to take into consideration hunches and intuitive guidance - echoes from other probable realities - and also other people's points of view. When Body of Fate predominates over Will people are willing to take risks and to fly with their impulses.

Mask is the sum total of all of a person's past and future life memories in all realities, which includes all the probable realities in all of those lifetimes. Note that each Faculty subsumes the previous ones: Body of Fate includes Will (the sum total of one's probable realities includes this present life history), and Mask includes Body of Fate (the sum total of one's past and future lives includes all the probable reality branches in those lives). The memories of the Mask are what we access in past life regressions. In quotidian life Mask is the Daimon's sense of personal significance: whatever dreams, hopes, ambitions the person holds in his or her heart of hearts Where Body of Fate operates on a level of mind, Mask operates more on a level of feeling; where Body of Fate connects the person to other people in individual relationships, Mask connects the person to other people in group relationships. Mask is what you discover when you run a lot of past life regressions and come to know the feel of who "you" are in your totality; of what you keep coming back in human form to accomplish; the overall mood which informs the totality of your past and future lives.

Creative Mind is what some philosophers have termed Gestalt or Collective Unconscious - all the racial memories which we share as humans, our collective knowledge, upon which we can each draw by virtue of our being human (in Yeats' system we are not interested in superhuman memories - e.g. anima and animus, our female and male sides, which all animals share; nor e.g. mammal, vertebrae, animal, multi-cellular, uni-cellular memory - but rather only the thought forms proper to human beings). Creative Mind is the same thing as the voices of our ancestors, which many human cultures (but not ours - which is why our society is presently destroying our planet) have revered from time immemorial. In societies which "worship" ancestors what is really going on is that shamans, or even individuals, actively channel the voices of their ancestors in making major decisions. These societies use the voices of their ancestors like we use television or the internet. But the people in these societies are attuned to a deeper current of collective wisdom than we Americans are.

The point is that a person's moment-to-moment decisions in any lifetime are made on one or the other of these four levels. For most people, 99.99% of decisions are made on the basis of Will, or socially-conditioned actions and reactions. But every now and then everyone has poignant moments, moments of conscientiousness or conscience or consciousness, when they sense that probable realities are branching off this way or that; or they feel echoes from other lifetimes and realities; or they hear voices from deep inside them. At these poignant moments people feel connected to something deeper than their usual everyday routines and habits; and that something is their true purpose in this life.

When a person is acting in accord with his or her true purpose in this life - their reason for incarnating, then they are said to be in-phase; and when they are just acting on a level of Will in mindless, knee-jerk reactivity, they are said to be out-of-phase. Yeats' life is a good example of what it means to be out-of-phase and in-phase. For most of his adult life Yeats dabbled in occultism, always seeking something of profound significance, but never finding it. And for most of this same period he was hopelessly in love with selfish, deceptive woman who completely trashed him emotionally. After thirty years of this frustrated romanticism something deep inside Yeats decided to stop chasing the fantasy woman and marry someone truly worthy. And four days later his new wife began channeling A Vision. In other words it was Yeats' decision to act on a deeper level than his illusions and daydreams that turned him from out-of-phase to in-phase - from only wishing and hoping to actually accomplishing his true purpose in incarnating in this life.

Everything that has been described thus far occupies only the first thirty pages of A Vision. The bulk of the book is concerned with a very complex system of astrological and historical symbolism based upon the phases of the moon; this system will only be summarized here. There are twenty-eight lunar phases, which represent the monthly cycle of the moon, viz: Phase 1 begins with the new moon; Phase 8 begins with the first quarter moon; Phase 15 begins with the full moon; and Phase 22 begins with the last quarter moon. The four lunar quarters consist of seven phases each, and each quarter is under the dominion of one of the Four Faculties. The 28 phases tell a little story of the Daimon's descent from unity (the cone of Concord, or primary tincture) at Phase 1 into material manifestation (the cone of Discord, or antithetical tincture) at Phase 15; and its return journey back again to Phase 1. Indeed, the circular nature of the cycle is emphasized by repeating Phase 1 (birth and rebirth) again after Phase 28 (death). Everyone is ruled by one of these 28 phases, depending upon the angle between the moon and the sun in the person's natal horoscope. In a sense it can be said that a person's natal phase symbolizes their purpose for incarnating in this present life.

The final part of A Vision describes a system of world history which divides historical periods of two thousand years into 28 phases. "The Christian Era, like the two thousand years, let us say, that went before it, is an entire wheel, and each half of it an entire wheel, that each half when it comes to its 28th Phase reaches the 15th Phase or the 1st Phase of the entire era." In this system the art, philosophy, and spirit of historical periods are shown to follow the rhythmic cycle of 28 phases from primary to antithetical and back again. Here's an example: "The period from 1005 to 1180 is attributed in the diagram to the first two gyres of our millennium, and what interests me in this period, which corresponds to the Homeric period some two thousand years before, is the creation of the Arthurian Tales and Romanesque architecture. ... I do not see in Gothic architecture, which is a character of the next gyre, that of Phases 5, 6 and 7, as did the nineteenth-century historians, ever looking for the image of their own age, the creation of a new communal freedom, but a creation of authority, a suppression of that freedom though with its consent ..."

Esoteric Yeats.......2004-11-03

Yeats's "A Vision" gives an esoteric and occult view of the nature of reality and is the product of years of collaboration between the poet, W. B. Yeats, and his wife, George, in automatic writing, followed by years of synthesis and research to work it into book form. The system presented here views everything as subject to a cycle of changes, "gyres", and the stages of the cycle are symbolised by the phases of the Moon. This cycle and its phases apply to human incarnations, the process of the soul's after-lives, and to the broad sweep of history. It is a difficult and coherent system, which has elements in common with other esoteric systems but is also different from them all.
The work exists in two versions: the 1925 version, "A Vision A", and the more final 1937 version, "A Vision B". Large blocks of the 1925 version remained unchanged in the 1937 one -- the descriptions of characters for each phase of the moon and the outline of history -- but the explanations of the processes and mechanisms involved were completely rewritten. If you are coming to "A Vision" for the first time, then you should probably go to the 1937 version first. Also, if your primary interest is the ideas, then the 1937 version is the more considered and mature treatment of the material. The 1925 version is, however, invaluable for students of Yeats, especially the later writings, since it represents a stage in his understanding of the material, which informs much of his poetry, as well as his plays and prose. Although it is generally less well organized than the 1937 version, some areas are dealt with more satisfactorily, including the relationship of human and Daimon. The fictional material, with which Yeats prefaces the exposition of the ideas, is also significantly different in the two versions.

The Kessinger reprint sometimes gives the date "1925" on the cover, but the actual text "A Vision B" (1937 version, corrected, 1962). This confusion is the result of taking the 1925 and 1937 versions as conventional first and second editions.

The following comments apply specifically to "A Critical Edition of 'A Vision' (1925)", edited by G. M. Harper and W. K. Hood, and will not apply to other editions. This edition is a facsimile of one of the 600 copies of this book which Yeats had printed privately in 1925, so it is not a Critical Edition in the normal sense. It does, however, include a very full introduction to the work and its genesis, as well as good notes. George Mills Harper has gone on to publish most of the preparatory material and automatic writing in "The Making of Yeats's 'Vision'" and "Yeats's Vision Papers", but the introduction here is still one of the best summaries of how the book came into being. The notes and index can be slightly thin at times, but are still very useful.

Note: the description of the contents given above by Amazon applies only to the 1937 version, "A Vision B" (normally 305 pp.). For "A Vision A" (xxiii + 256 pp) or the "Critical Edition of 'A Vision' (1925)" (L + xxiii + 256 + 108 pp), the contents should be:
[Editorial Introduction] A Vision: Dedication to Vestigia; Introduction by Owen Aherne; Book 1: What the Caliph Partly Learned; Book 2: What the Caliph Refused to Learn; Book 3: Dove or Swan; Book 4: The Gates of Pluto. [Notes; Bibliography; Index].

A Vision.......2000-03-29

Readers of this book should be prepared to study. Yeats knowledge of mysticism is deep. He was a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn and had experience in conjuring in the British Museums with Assyrian artifacts. This book is based on a form of astrology, but not of the modern day "what's your sign " superficiality. Again readers must be prepared to do additional study, in the Vedas, the Gita, and Buddhist classics (start with DT Suzuki). This book ranks with Freud for its magnitude . Yeats has not been given the credit he deserves.

Short Fiction (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics)

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Short Fiction (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics)
William Butler Yeats , and G. J. Watson
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Yeats (A Galaxy Book 378)
Harold Bloom
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Book Description

At once praised and condemned by his contemporaries and by critics ever since for his highly complex poetic vision, William Butler Yeats remains one of the most important and controversial twentieth-century poets. In what has become a classic work of literary criticism, award-winning critic Harold Bloom breaks new ground with his radical interpretation of Yeats' relationship to the English Romantic tradition. Yeats tells the continuous story of the lifelong influence of Shelley, Blake, and the Romantic tradition upon Yeats' work. Through his analysis of the full spectrum of Yeats' poems and plays, Bloom offers a profound reinterpretation of poetic influence in general.

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