Though scholars have long known of Yeats's Notebooks of automatic writing, sleeps, and dreams, which he and his wife, George, kept, the contents have not been available in a form accessible to the general public. This dissertation presents a text of the papers known as the Sleep and Dream Notebooks written between March 1920 and July 1923. These four Notebooks and the related miscellaneous pages inserted into them by Yeats or his wife, follow chronologically the Notebooks which record the couple's experiments with automatic writing. The Sleep and Dream Notebooks record Yeats's personal involvement with various psychic methods which he felt would help in the writing of A Vision. These Notebooks attest to the degree to which a knowledge of Yeats's psychic studies are integral to an understanding of his later work. / The original Notebooks are in the hands of both Yeats and his wife, and are legible only with lengthy study. The dissertation presents the texts of the Notebooks with minimal editorial intrusion, maintaining irregularities of grammar and syntax, peculiarities of style. Included in the text are the numerous line drawings made by both of the Yeatses to record and explain the philosophy of his System. A preface describes the original condition of the material and the specific ways it is treated to arrive at the text. An introduction explains the relationship of the Notebooks to Yeats, his other psychic materials, and the writing of A Vision. Textual and explanatory notes of allusions and difficult material follow the texts of the Notebooks. / The Sleep and Dream Notebooks characterize 1920-1923 as a period during which Yeats lived his philosophy, recounting such an integral association of the spiritual with the corporeal that the reader is convinced of Yeats's desire to see as functional the drama about which, it is now apparent, he structured his later life. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 45-04, Section: A, page: 1123. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1982.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_75301 |
| Contributors | MARTINICH, ROBERT ANTHONY., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 263 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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