The daimon is a primordial necessity of confrontation with the numinous which grounds its roots in the history of the human being and manifests itself, in a very protean manner, in the most genial and perceptive minds of every epoch. Deeply driven by this compulsion and inspired by masters who experienced the daimonic before them, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) and the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) have undertaken investigations into this phenomenon. The examination ofYeats' A Vision (1937) and Jung's Red Book (2009) not only reveals the objective engagement with an entity which seems to have possessed them and provoked involuntary acts of creation dictated by unconscious psychical forces, but also shows the subjective reality of the daimonic, converting these works in voluntary experiments with this overpowering force. From the comparative study of Yeats' A Vision and Jung's Red Book, it emerges that the daimon acts as a systematising figure which helped them organise their own works into systems, namely into ordered and structured patterns aimed at the attainment of wholeness and unity. For Jung this unity consisted in the achievement of the Self, and of Unity of Being for Yeats. The daimon does not act as a systematiser only: through the analysis of A Vision and the Red Book it is possible to demonstrate that it can be systematised too. The observation of these 'works leads indeed to identify a common pattern of manifestation of the daimonic, epitomised by an archetypal trilogy: persona, anima and wise old man for Jung; mask, anti-self and higher self for Yeats.

Eliot's admiration for the poetry of the seventeenth century is well known. However, the several documents that explore the subject (thinly scattered across decades) fail to constitute a full account. Drawing on manuscript and print sources, and tracing particularly Eliot's prose poetics, this thesis redresses the scholarly need for a nuanced account of Eliot's role among the Metaphysical poets. The relationship ran in both directions, most famously in Eliot's championing of the poets and his urging that they find a new readership. His part in the revival of Metaphysical poetry, though, has been greatly exaggerated and the record is here faithfully adjusted. He was not in any way responsible for that revival, though he is its most important product, as is shown by a careful reconstruction of turn-of-the-century transcontinental publishing and reception. Eliot's criticism tells its own, largely unexplored story about the Metaphysicals and their influence on his critical and poetic sensibility. Most scholars, for instance, know that Eliot loved Donne, but few know the origin of that interest, let alone its brief nature or the personal reasons that drove him to appreciate the poet's audacity. Most also know the Modernist dicta of Tradition, objective correlative and the dissociation of sensibility, but not the fact that each owes something to Eliot's thinking about Donne. Engaging with Harvard class notes, under-consulted textbooks and a close study of Eliot's articles from the 1910s, two separate chapters investigate his education and early prose, along with their delicate dance between impersonality and confessional criticism. 1921-1926 marks a crucial stage in Eliot's writing, both for his poetry and his criticism. The Metaphysicals provide the clearest barometer of that change as well as the space where he approached conversion. This thesis is the first to trace the poets throughout Eliot's criticism, one of the first to engage with his Metaphysical-themed Clark Lectures, and the first to move far past Eliot's conversion, interpreting George Herbert as typical of his late mindset. In 1961 Eliot claimed no one had been as influenced by the Metaphysical poets as he had been. What this thesis offers is not only a more nuanced portrait of that influence but also a glimpse into the educational, critical and reading cultures of the early 1900s.

Towards the end of the seventeenth century, the learned journal emerged as a new genre of periodical publication essential to the burgeoning enthusiasm for new learning in early modern Europe. The first of the learned journals, the Journal des scavans, born in 1665 in Paris, contained book abstracts, scientific reports, reader essays and literary news. This format was imitated across Europe, most prolifically in the United Provinces, where Huguenot refugees-turned-journalists often used Francophone learned journals to challenge traditional sources of authority. The model was introduced to Ireland by Jean-Pierre Droz, a journalist, bookseller and publisher, as well as a pastor of the conformed Huguenot congregation in Dublin. With the simple title of A Literary Journal (5 vols, 1744-1749), Droz's periodical resembled the Franco-Dutch erudite journals; in fact, Droz admitted to adapting material from such titles for his own Journal. Scholarship to date has produced a comprehensive picture of two of A Literary Journal's key characteristics. These are firstly its focus on European, especially French-language, books; a second is its reliance on borrowed material, primarily from other learned journals. The original contribution of the present thesis is to recontextualize A Literary Journal, by foregrounding the role of domestic and immediate context, in contrast with existing studies which focus on its historic and European pedigree. After having examined the Journal alongside its source periodicals and contemporary publications, I argue firstly, that the Journal was both Irish and European; secondly, that it contained a significant amount of original material; and thirdly, that its editorial voice conveyed a pervasive doctrinal message in favour of religious toleration and liberal Christianity. In this respect, Droz and his Journal participated in the Irish Enlightenment. A Literary Journal was not just a continental-style learned title in eighteenth-century Ireland. It was a continental-style learned title/or eighteenth-century Ireland.

This thesis examines the way in which Plato and Platonic theories appear overtly and opportunistically in Chaucer's writings. It looks at some of the more evident ways in which the poet invokes the philosopher, but also argues that Chaucer 'cherry-picks' what he wants from Plato, and (in some cases), changes the fundamental premise of the philosophical tenet upon which the original is based in order to make a creative statement. A theme of the Platonic notion of contrarieties will run throughout the thesis at times it will necessarily discuss at some length the philosophical heritage inherited by the late fourteenth century. I will look firstly at ways in which Plato appears in Chaucer's more famously philosophical works before focusing on some of the less 'popular' Canterbury Tales, and will, in turn also draw attention to issues in Chaucer that can be seen to have been initiated by ancient philosophy, insofar as Chaucer is likely to have received them, or to have been aware of their arguments. At no time does this thesis argue for a direct transmission or connection between the writings of Plato and those of Chaucer. Rather, I argue that in Chaucer we see peculiar elements of Platonic theory (either an appropriation or a challenge thereof), and that such a philosophical approach from a reader both adds to a critical debate regarding the relationship between Chaucer and philosophy, and deepens an appreciation of the way in which some of Chaucer's more maligned texts are, in fact, some of his most rewarding.

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This thesis examines how the occult tradition is an inherent part of the production of vernacular literature during the Elizabethan period. I argue that occult discourses about language are drawn upon by writers of the period who seek to establish an English literature to rival that of the classical tradition. The quotidian nature of occult philosophies which vacillate between the scientific and the magical in the early modern period has been recognised in recent criticism. Taking into consideration the etymological root of the word occult as secret or hidden, this thesis departs from the traditional demarcations of occult studies. By removing the occult from the realm of the magus and dramatic sensationalism, this thesis begins with the premise that occult discourses are present within Elizabethan culture and are absorbed into textual practice. It adopts the term occult poetics to describe the processes of writing that rely upon occult discourses to imbue efficacious qualities and communicate esoteric knowledge within Elizabethan vernacular poetry. I examine John Dee, traditionally viewed as a magus-figure, and resituate him within discourses about language. I show that Dee believed the divine origins of language lay in geometry and number, and that his semiotics informs his hopes for Elizabethan imperialism. Contemporaneous to Dee’s depiction of Elizabeth as imperial queen is Edmund Spenser’s cry to establish English as a kingdom of language, which leads to experimentation with English verse that is based on the occult qualities of number and quantity. I consider how occult and emergent scientific discourses are engaged with in the new poetry in terms of cosmology with Fulke Greville and Giordano Bruno, and optics in George Chapman’s poetry. Finally, I approach the figure of Elizabeth as an occult body analogous to the lodestone who sits at the centre of language production through analysing Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.

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