Description
Book SynopsisYeats, Philosophy, and the Occult is a collection of essays examining the thought of the Irish poet W. B. Yeats and particularly his philosophical reading and explorations of older systems of thought, where philosophy, mysticism, and the supernatural blend. It opens with a broad survey of the current state of Yeats scholarship, which also includes an examination of Yeats’s poetic practice through a manuscript of the original core of a poem that became a work of philosophical thought and occult lore, “The Phases of the Moon.” The following essay examines an area where spiritualism, eugenic theory, and criminology cross paths in the writings of Cesare Lombroso, and Yeats’s response to his work. The third paper considers Yeats’s debts to the East, especially Buddhist and Hindu thought, while the fourth looks at his ideas about the dream-state, the nature of reality, and contact with the dead. The fifth essay explores Yeats’s understanding of the concept of the Great Year from classical astronomy and philosophy, and its role in the system of his work
A Vision, and the sixth paper studies that work’s theory of “contemporaneous periods” affecting each other across history in the light of Oswald Spengler’s
The Decline of the West. The seventh essay evaluates Yeats’s reading of Berkeley and his critics’ appreciation (or lack of it) of how he responds to Berkeley’s idealism. The book as a whole explores how Yeats’s mind and thought relate to his poetry, drama, and prose, and how his reading informs all of them.
Trade ReviewReviews ‘The book concludes with two appendices... consolidating the book’s position at the cutting edge of the ‘archival turn’ in Yeats studies and new modernist studies more generally.’
The Year’s Work in English StudiesTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsList of Figures and TableList of AbbreviationsList of ContributorsIntroduction
1. “Something Intended, Complete”: Major Work on Yeats Past, Present, and Yet to Come - Wayne K. Chapman
2. Ghost, Medium, Criminal, Genius: Lombrosian Types in Yeats’s Art and Philosophy - Katherine Ebury
3. “Born Anew”: W. B. Yeats’s “Eastern” Turn in the 1930s - Charles I. Armstrong
4. W. B. Yeats, Dream, Vision, and the Dead - Neil Mann
5. Yeats, the Great Year, and Pierre Duhem - Matthew Gibson
6. The Morphological Interaction of the
Four Faculties in the Historical System of W. B. Yeats’s
A Vision - Graham A. Dampier
7. Yeats and Abstraction: From Berkeley to Zen - Colin McDowell
AppendicesI. Annotations in the Writings of Walter Savage Landor in the Yeatses’ Library
II. Yeats’s Notes on Leo Frobenius’s
The Voice of Africa (1913)
Index
