A Vision: The Revised 1937 Edition: The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Volume XIV

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

CONTENTS

Editors’ Preface and Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

List of Illustrations

Editors’ Introduction

A Vision (1937)

A Packet for Ezra Pound

Rapallo

Introduction to A Vision

To Ezra Pound

Stories of Michael Robartes and His Friends: An Extract from a Record Made by His Pupils

The Phases of the Moon

Book I: The Great Wheel

Part I: The Principal Symbol

Part II: Examination of the Wheel

Part III: The Twenty-Eight Incarnations

Book II: The Completed Symbol

Book III: The Soul in Judgment

Book IV: The Great Year of the Ancients

Book V: Dove or Swan

All Souls’ Night: An Epilogue

Textual Matters and Notes

Appendix I: Proofs, Versions, Emendations, and Hyphenations

Corrections to the Yeatses’ Copies of A Vision

Comparison of A Vision with Proofs

Emendations to the Copy Text

End-of-Line Word Division in the Copy Text

Appendix II: Earlier Versions

Excised Section of Rapallo (Packet, 7–9)

Book II Typescript (NLI 36,272/6/1b, leaves 2–5)

Book II Typescript (NLI 36,272/6/1b, leaves 14–18)

Book II Typescript (NLI 36,272/6/1b, leaves 30–32)

Book III Typescript (NLI 36,272/6/2a, leaves 5–8)

Book III Typescript (NLI 36,272/6/2a, leaves 14–26)

Book IV Typescript (NLI 36,272/26, leaves 10–12)

Book IV Typescript (NLI 36,272/30, leaf 28)

Book V Typescript (NLI 36,272/6/2c)

About Margaret Mills Harper and Catherine E. Paul

Notes

Index

For Connie K. and Walter Kelly Hood

EDITORS’ PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The editors gratefully acknowledge the extraordinary generosity of the Yeats family, the late Michael, Gráinne, and Anne Yeats, and Caitríona Yeats, who, along with her siblings Siobhán, the late Síle, and Padraig Yeats, continues a legacy of unwavering support of those who cough in ink or pixels to edit and annotate the work of W. B. Yeats. Such magnanimity is rare, and all Yeats scholars are in their debt.

We also extend the first order of thanks to Walter and Connie Kelly Hood, the first designated editors of the 1937 A Vision for this series. To observe that this edition would not have been possible without their extensive archival and contextual work is to understate drastically, and we are deeply in their debt. Other scholars who have contributed generously include Jonathan Allison, Brian Arkins, George Bornstein, Ronald Bush, Wayne K. Chapman, Patricia Coughlan, Alex Davis, John Dillon, Wayne Erickson, Sr. Mary de Lourdes Fahy, Matthew Gibson, Warwick Gould, Mark Patrick Hederman OSB, Michael G. Kelly, Sr. Maria Kiely, Peter Liebregts, Neil Mann, Bernadette McCarthy, Gillian McIntosh, Mary Kathryn Mishler, Mitsuko Ohno, James Pethica, Laura Mernie Pomeroy, LeeAnne Richardson, Ronald Schuchard, Sanghita Sen, William David Soud, Deirdre Toomey, Wim Van Mierlo, and Tom Walker. We thank for superb research assistance Paula McGeever, Niall Jordan, Niamh O’Hehir, and Stephanie O’Riordan (University of Limerick); Zachary Cromie and George DuBose (Clemson University); and Nancy Kojima and Jim Shimkus (Georgia State University).

Librarians who have given of their time and expertise include Tom Desmond, Catherine Fahy, Colette O’Daly, and Pat Sweeney at the National Library of Ireland; Pattie Punch at the Glucksman Library, University of Limerick; Rebecca Drummond at the University Library, Georgia State University; Elizabeth Chase and colleagues at MARBL (Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Book Library), Emory University; Kristen Nyitray at Special Collections, Frank Melville, Jr., Memorial Library, Stony Brook University Libraries; staff of the Manuscript Reading Room and the Humanities Reading Rooms at the British Library (Macmillan archives); and staff at Thompson Library, Ohio State University; Harvard University Library; Trinity College Library; and the McClay Library, Queen’s University Belfast.

We are grateful for the financial support of the College of Architecture, Arts and Humanities and Department of English, Clemson University; the School of Languages, Literatures, Culture and Communication, University of Limerick; and the Department of English, Georgia State University. We extend special thanks to Richard W. Stoops, Jr., for unstinting technical support; George Bornstein, upon whom we have relied for clearheaded advice and assistance; and Samantha Martin and Ashley Gilliam, our patient and thoroughly helpful editors at Scribner.

ABBREVIATIONS

ILLUSTRATIONS

1. W. B. Yeats, 1907

2. Portrait of Giraldus

3. [Unicorn]

4. The Great Wheel

5. [Cones of Discord and Concord]

6. [Cones of Time, Space, Subjectivity, and Objectivity]

7. [Primary and Antithetical Cones]

8. [Relationship between Will and Creative Mind]

9. [Just before Complete Antithetical Expansion]

10. [Just after Complete Antithetical Expansion]

11. [Antithetical Man]

12. [Primary Man]

13. [Complete Primary State]

14. [Midway between Primary and Antithetical]

15. [Lunar Phases on Gyres]

16. [Lunar Phases on Circle]

17. [Lunar Phases on the Great Wheel]

18. [Principles and Authentic Existants of Plotinus]

19. [Principles when Will Passing Phase 17]

20. [Principles when Will at Phase 15]

21. [Movement of the Four Faculties within Cones of the Principles]

22. The Historical Cones

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION

A Vision was impossible to finish, much to WBY’s dismay, and despite repeated claims of near or final completion. But he never stopped trying. Having published a first, limited edition with T. Werner Laurie, a version he regarded as seriously flawed, WBY immediately began revising. Even after a second edition was published by Macmillan a dozen years after the first, WBY found it incomplete, imperfect, inadequate. The present volume presents that second edition while offering some sense of both posthumous editions and ways that A Vision might have continued to evolve.

On December 31, 1934, Harold Macmillan wrote to A. P. Watt and Sons, WBY’s literary agent:

Mr. Yeats called in here just before Christmas and wants us to produce a new edition of a book entitled A Vision which I think he printed privately many years ago, and which has also been published in another form in the past. I believe it now to be out of print, and Mr. Yeats has largely re-written it. I do not know whether he spoke to you about it, but I assume he had done so. If so, you will realise that the subject matter of the book is one that makes a very limited appeal. To most ordinary minds it appears to be quite mad, and I cannot believe that the sale will be anything but a very small one. I rather gathered from Mr. Yeats that he shared this view.1

Between the appearance of the Laurie edition in January 1926 (despite the date of 1925 on its title page) and Macmillan’s much larger run of the second edition on October 7, 1937, WBY made extensive changes—removing and rewriting large swathes of text, adding new prefatory material, and completely rethinking parts of the system. The 1937 version had become effectively a new work.

The first edition had received limited and critical reviews. An anonymous reviewer in The New Statesman called the book a dark and difficult study. Ernest de Selincourt acknowledged its accomplishment, its genius of intuition, its fleeting beauty, but suggested that WBY has not struck the system which will free his imagination for the unrolling of final poetic truth, concluding that the book is tiresome because of the conviction it leaves with us that he knows this as well as anyone and yet cannot detach himself from the delights of dalliance. Three years later, Edmund Wilson wondered whether WBY, who shrouded the revelations of AVA in fictions, intends us to take it seriously and whether the poet was really attempting, in a sense, to eat his cake and have it, too?2 G. R. S. Mead, on the other hand, aimed to get to the bottom of the fictions, saying that the book would be of greater value had WBY told us quite frankly how he became possessed of the information. Like Frank Pearce Sturm, he found fault with the inferior Latin of the title of the fictitious source, the Speculum Angelorum et Homenorum, concluding that spelling to be a ‘howler’ for which Smith Minor at a Preparatory School would receive condign punishment. Making a comparison that WBY would also make, he noted that Oswald Spengler might have helped Mr. Yeats to a more plausible survey, concluding that "when we are asked to subscribe 3 3s. for a copy of a book, we expect it to be either one that contains some very valuable reliable information or a literary masterpiece; and it cannot be said that A Vision as a whole comes up to either expectation."3

It is no surprise, then, that WBY would want to improve A Vision. His ambitions for the new version were high; he noted in a letter to his old friend Olivia Shakespear in September 1929 that this new edition will be a new book, all I hope clear and as simple as the subject permits. He hoped, he told her, that his book would have a real power beyond ratiocination: I have constructed a myth, but then one can believe in a myth—one only assents to philosophy. Heaven is an improvement of sense—one listens to music, one does not read Hegel’s logic.4

This introduction offers a sense of how the 1937 version of A Vision came to be. We treat WBY’s recasting of text from the first version of A Vision and his writing and initial publication of new material.5 Turning to the 1937 publication, we attend to the setting materials sent to Macmillan, revisions made even at proof stages, the product issued in London in 1937 and in New York in 1938, and reception of the new edition. And because WBY could not stop rethinking A Vision, we note corrections made by WBY and GY (equally responsible for the construction of the system of A Vision) after the publication of the second edition—made mostly in anticipation of an Edition De Luxe of the poet’s work, of which A Vision was to have been a part. Work on this collected edition continued after WBY’s death, as GY and Thomas Mark of Macmillan tried to produce a corrected edition of the text, taking into consideration corrections made by WBY and corrections they deemed necessary based on their understanding of the system and A Vision. Although World War II and ensuing economic limitations meant that the revised version of A Vision is only now part of a collected edition, there were later corrected editions issued in the United States (in 1956 and 1961) and in the United Kingdom (in 1962). We treat the editing process for those editions, which rather than producing the definitive editions they advertised introduced further errors. After the complicated history of the text, we offer our editorial principles for the current edition. In all, this introduction offers a compact treatment of how A Vision was made.

MATERIAL FROM AVA AND NEW EXPOSITION (1926 TO 1937)

In April 1925, WBY celebrated finishing A Vision, declaring himself free to write letters again & idle, but that feeling would not last.6 He explains in his Introduction to the Great Wheel that his instructors had told him not to read philosophy until their exposition was complete, and that his ignorance of philosophy made him fail to understand distinctions upon which the coherence of the whole depended.7 However, WBY continues, When the proof sheets came I felt myself relieved from my promise not to read philosophy and began with Berkeley.8 As elsewhere in that Introduction, WBY more or less speaks the truth, and the evidence of his self-imposed course in reading offers important clues to his revising of his book.9