William Butler Yeats's involvement in the esoteric and the occult has attracted considerable interest in the past decade, but much remains unknown about his philosophical development during the period of his life when he was engaged in the most profound spiritual or psychical investigation or experiment of his brilliant career, an experiment which gave birth to A Vision. Often described as the most important work in the canon to the understanding of his art and thought if not his life, this ambitious work represents Yeats's attempt to explain the basic psychological polarities of the human personality, the course of Western civilization, and the evolution and movement of the soul after death. The cogency and gravity of the experiment of investigation which produced a book of these epic proportions cannot be underestimated; indeed, the contents of this well-recorded experiment may well be the most significant body of unexplored Yeats material. The fundamental aim of this study, which includes only the first crucial months of the Automatic Script, is to present to the scholarly world for the first time a transcript of the often obscure, often complex body of materials that led directly to Yeats's most profound work of art. In order to place this manuscript in its proper biographical and critical context, explanatory notes have been included, explicating the essential features of the experiment (i.e., the recording of dates, the authors of questions and responses, the placement of diagrams and notes by George and Yeats, the physical state of the manuscript, etc.) and unraveling or spelling out the numerous references to Yeats's primary works, those appearing prior to as well as those growing directly out of the Automatic Script; special attention has been focused on those materials which were eventually embodied in the 1925 version of A Vision. An editorial / introduction preceding the transcript demonstrates how this momentous experiment was the logical extension of a series of psychical investigations and, in much broader terms, the culmination of a spiritual odyssey that Yeats had begun almost as early as the days of his youth. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 45-08, Section: A, page: 2522. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1982.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_77778 |
| Contributors | ADAMS, STEVE LAMAR., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 278 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
Page generated in 0.0017 seconds