Professor George Mills Harper writes in his recent book The Making of Yeats's 'A Vision': A Study of the Automatic Script that, despite his copious quotations from these unpublished manuscripts, "nothing but the whole will satisfy the truly involved reader." Perhaps the most comprehensive occult papers that have been preserved in the history of psychical research, the 3627 existing pages of the Automatic Script are of extreme interest to Yeats scholars, not only as the source for A Vision but also as documentation of the creative collaboration between Yeats and his new wife George during the 450 sittings held between 5 Nov 1917 and 28 Mar 1920. This critical edition provides the complete text for that portion of the Automatic Script written during the Yeatses' first visit to Ireland following their marriage. (Under the direction of Professor Harper, Steve L. Adams has edited the first two months of the Script as a doctoral dissertation in 1982, and Sandra Sprayberry is preparing that portion of the Script written between 2 Jan 1919 and 28 Mar 1920.) Included in this dissertation is an editorial introduction describing the methods used by the Yeatses in the automatic writing and its subsequent "codification"; the relationship of the Script to Yeats's 1918 poetry and plays; and the synthesis of his life-long involvement in the occult Yeats achieves in the two versions of A Vision. Extensive endnotes relate the Automatic Script to Yeats's Card File and Vision notebooks as well as to his poetry, plays, and the two versions. Of special note is the emergence of the tower as a major symbol as the Yeatses first occupied Thoor Ballylee, and their growing conviction that their expected child would be the Irish Avatar. The 1918 Script demonstrates clearly that George Yeats was an equal partner in the amazing collaboration that produced A Vision and that provided her husband with metaphors for his later poetry. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 51-05, Section: A, page: 1619. / Major Professor: George Mills Harper. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1987.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_77774 |
| Contributors | Frieling, Barbara Johnston., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 452 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
Page generated in 0.002 seconds