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

On May 22, 1925, well before AVA-Laurie was published on January 15, 1926, WBY wrote to GY that he was reading Plato’s Timaeus, works by Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie on the Egyptian origin of mystical thought, and the texts of Hermes Trismegistus. All through 1926 and into 1927, WBY corresponded with his fellow poet T. Sturge Moore about his readings in European philosophy, including Vico, Hegel, Kant, Hartmann, Schopenhauer, Berkeley, G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, Bergson, Gentile, Croce, Spengler, Whitehead, and Henry James—as well as Greek and Latin classics and scholarly works on them, from A. E. Taylor on Plato to the translation of Plotinus by Stephen MacKenna. Letters to GY, friends, and others also mention religious texts from Pauline Christianity to Zen Buddhism.10 Among modern currents and figures, WBY discovered an affinity with the writings of Wyndham Lewis, especially The Art of Being Ruled (1926) and Time and Western Man (1927).¹¹

Indeed, in the years between 1926 and 1937, WBY was concerned with a number of readerly projects, all attacked with considerable energy (so much so that he at times made himself ill and needed to be stopped by doctor’s orders). He renewed an old interest in art history, and he undertook detailed research in comparative religion, history (especially of Rome and the eighteenth century, as well as particular writers such as Henry Adams and Arnold Toynbee), and political thought (from a wide range of ideological leanings), not to mention such specialized topics as the history of calendars. His work with Shri Purohit Swāmi in the early 1930s led to an extensive course in Hindu philosophy, including (besides the principal Upanishads) readings in Vedānta, classical Yoga, Tantra, and bhakti (especially Vaishnavism).¹²

As always, WBY read widely in contemporary literature in English. Particularly after agreeing to edit the Oxford Book of Modern Verse in 1934, he tried to uncover what might characterize his cultural moment. Happily for our purposes, WBY’s efficient habits of composition, which involved using similar thoughts and sources for multiple projects, give multiple contexts in which to understand the sometimes eccentric interpretations he brought to bear on his reading. Thus, for example, rereading Plotinus, with the help of the superb translation by Stephen MacKenna, helped him explain the Principles in A Vision, as well as the “timeless individuality” that accounts for spirits in séances or the “stream of souls” of reincarnation, described in the introductions that accompany the plays The Words upon the Window-Pane and The Resurrection.¹³

One of the most important sources for AVB is the magisterial multivolume Système du monde of the French physicist and historian of science Pierre Duhem, a work that both traces and argues for the importance of premodern and medieval science. It helped WBY understand a system that depends much on astronomical (and astrological) data.14 On November 16, 1937, he explained to the British writer Helen Beauclerk (whom WBY knew through her lover Edmund Dulac) that “Pierre Duhem ‘Systeme du Monde’ (4 vols. Librairie Scientifique A. Hermann et Fils, Paris. 1917) was essential to anybody who wanted to get a grasp of the myth and philosophy of the Greeks, Romans, and of our own Middle Ages. It summarises the physics, cosmogony, and the philosophical bearings of both through all the centuries up to the Rennaissance.”¹⁵ WBY’s French was shaky, and Duhem’s prose is very dense; Duhem’s influence on AVB testifies to the continuing importance of GY, who almost certainly translated for her husband. Although the AS had more or less tapered off by the mid-1920s, GY continued to be an essential consultant on the ideas she and WBY had developed together (occasionally still in conjunction with the supernatural communicators of the automatic experiments).

Although we cannot date WBY’s work on sections of AVB with precision by following his reading, it is possible to make inferences. To give just one example, we note that Section II of Book IV (178–79) was revised in autumn 1931, when WBY asked GY to look up passages for him in the work of the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth. Other sections, such as Section XIV of Book II (154–55), may also have been reworked at about this time, in late 1931 and early 1932, when WBY was staying at Coole with his old friend Lady Gregory, during her last illness. This period occurs between one of several of WBY’s announcements that he had finished “The Vision” and the realization that there was more to do: “I shall spend the spring & summer . . . getting ‘the Vision’ into final shape.”¹⁶ His thinking on such topics from Book II as the Daimon, destiny, light, and a universal self, in this instance, suggest his reading or rereading of several sources in close succession or simultaneously:

1. Shelley (whose Prometheus Unbound he reread in December 1931 and about whose not altogether positive influence on his early life he wrote an essay in 1932);

2. the Asclepius dialogue from the Hermetic fragments in the Walter Scott edition published in 1924 (studied for purposes of rethinking the Daimon, as a marginal note on “daimon not phasal” makes clear);

3. George Berkeley (M. M. Rossi, who co-edited Berkeley in an edition for which WBY had written an introduction in 1931, had been a guest at Coole in August 1931);

4. Balzac’s novel Louis Lambert (WBY was, he told GY on December 22, 1931, “reading Balzac with all my old delight,” and he wrote an essay on this novel in 1933); and

5. Vedantic philosophy (WBY had received Robert Ernest Hume’s translation of the Thirteen Principal Upanishads for Christmas in 1931 and had begun to read the autobiography of Shri Purohit Swāmi in the early months of 1932).17

WBY’s reading and revision are largely interrelated. Even in AVA, WBY warned, “I could I daresay make the book richer, perhaps immeasurably so, if I were to keep it by me for another year, and I have not even dealt with the whole of my subject, perhaps not even with what is most important . . . ; but I am longing to put it out of reach that I may write the poetry it seems to have made possible,” and “Doubtless I must someday complete what I have begun.”¹⁸ The Yeatses’ marks in their four copies of AVA-Laurie suggest an early eye toward a corrected version.¹⁹ Indeed, many sections of the 1937 published text follow that of 1926 quite closely; see the table in this introduction (xl).

These retentions do not mean that WBY intended simple corrections: he was convinced that the first version of A Vision was deeply flawed. His conversation with the poet and translator Frank Pearce Sturm—who shared WBY’s interest in esoterica and read the first version of A Vision quite carefully—began almost immediately after its release. On January 19, 1926, Sturm wrote with numerous specific corrections, saying, “Until some dull dog with an eye for detail & accuracy goes over book II, it will remain incomprehensible simply because of inaccuracies in the text.”²⁰ From then through early March, the two corresponded frequently, with WBY trying to clarify lunar and solar movement, the importance of gyres to St. Thomas Aquinas and Virgil, relationships between the Yeatses’ system and astronomical movement, Macrobius’s Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, the Syrian gnostic poet Bardesanes, the “dog Latin” of the fictional title Speculum Angelorum et Hominorum, and the writings of the Elizabethan mathematician and occultist Dr. John Dee. On March 1, WBY asked, “Have you found any more errors?”21

Plans for “major revisions” of the book are mentioned in a notebook begun in 1921, in a long diary entry from March 14, 1926.²² As early as May 1926, WBY was recommending against buying the book, which he described as “horribly expensive” and “only a first draft of a book & intended for students of Plotinus, the Hermetic fragments & unpopular literature of that kind.”²³ By mid-1926—during the same time that the poem “The Tower” ponders choosing “Plato and Plotinus for a friend” (Poems 198)—WBY began revising A Vision. By June, he was making extensive notes in the 1921 notebook of material to add to A Vision, should there be another edition.²⁴ In a diary entry that could not have been written before March 1927, he notes, “I see now that section XII Book IV in ‘A Vision’ should have been the most important in the book, & it is the slightest and worst.” A page later, in what may be a continuation of the same entry or a separate entry, he observes, “The part of ‘Vision’ about the Beatitude is also poor.”²⁵ Increasingly the pages of this notebook, as well as the “Rapallo” notebooks, are filled with rewritings of various sections. Some entries look very much like sections in AVA.²⁶

Some revisions seem to come out of his rereading of his own text. “Error in Vision – pages 159, 160,” he notes in the 1921 notebook, referring to the passage about “The Cones of Individual Life.”²⁷ Others begin as answers to questions from readers. On May 25, 1926, he told Olivia Shakespear that he was “writing answers to a long series of questions sent me by a reader of a ‘Vision’ & Plotinus helps me there.”²⁸ An undated entry in the 1921 notebook is organized around questions from Mary Devenport O’Neill: “How is will affected by 26000 year cycle?”; “How is civilization upheld in 2000 year gyre?”; “Has a daimon any separate masters apart from human being to whom it belongs?”; “How do Four Principles affect us during life?”; “What sort of ghosts are Daimons & Demigods?”; “What accounts for out burst, literature all lower northern Europe in 19th century?” His drafted answers extend over many manuscript pages.²⁹ In all cases, there is a concern with the terminology, diagrams, geometry, and the interrelationships of various parts of the system.

Throughout are expressions of concern and frustration at the published text. “The old statement is probably wrong and certainly confusing,” WBY comments at one point, going on to rethink the cones of the Faculties.30 He makes a series of notes labeled “Important,” and they seem to be reminders not just of how to change the text but of where his central focus should be. The series culminates in a declaration of “Important” written in a particularly large and loopy hand, as if in haste or with great emotion: “All I have written about great year a muddle. Dionertes first statements correct. Great Year begun at Lunar East (Lunar ).”³¹ Each attempt to clarify opened new puzzles and raised new questions, requiring further revision of the text and its diagrams.

WBY’s correspondence offers further evidence. In October 1927, two letters to Maud Gonne include possible drafts of his thinking about victimage, love, and hate. On March 12, 1928, WBY tells Lady Gregory that he alternates between revising A Vision and writing the material for A Packet. On April 2, WBY notes to Jack Lindsay that he has “just finished a long essay on what I called ‘The Four Principles’ & am now passing on to ‘The Four Faculties’. There are two or three bad errors in the geometrical symbolism itself to correct.” He writes to GY on July 23, 1929, “I have done all the troubl some [sic] part of the system now—after a little tidying up tomorrow I shall begin to copy out what I have done. The other night I tried to get some instruction on the religeous [sic] side of it all in my dreams. Result—a magnificent Cathedral & a man in it who started to prey [sic] for my conversion. I got perfectly furious & told him that such a preyer [sic] was an insult. I hope he was not Dionurtes [sic].” On September 13, WBY tells his dear friend Olivia Shakespear, “I am taking to Rapallo what will be I hope a clear typed script of the whole book. I will work at it here & there free at last, now that all is constructed to sharpen definitions & enrich descriptions. I should go to press with it next Spring.” In early October, a similar prediction of completion is sent to Frank Pearce Sturm: “The Vision, now ‘The Great Wheel’ requires another six months simplification, but it is already fairly simple.”³² During this same year, he finished, proofed, and published A Packet for Ezra Pound.

By 1930, WBY was again declaring the book finished and thinking ahead to the published volume, while at the same time working on The Winding Stair, The Words upon the Window-Pane, The Resurrection, and plans for the new Macmillan Edition de Luxe. In February 1931, he declares to Olivia Shakespear, “I have really finished ‘A VISION’—I turn over the pages & find nothing to add. I am still at Coole but go to Dublin to morrow to dictate ‘A Vision’ from my MSS to a certain young man, a friend of McGreavys who has come from Paris for the purpose.” Months later, on October 13, he informs GY, “I have now finished—all but the bit from Cicero—the section of the Great Year. All that remains is some revision of ‘A Packet for Ezra Pound’ and a few final paragraphs to wind up the book.” In another letter to Shakespear from December 1931, he mentions dictating corrections and additions to GY—and that “Two days ago she went back to Dublin taking it with her. I asked her to take it that I might return to verse.” He did not relinquish it altogether, however: on April 14, 1932, he tells GY that he plans to “spend the spring & summer with proofs [for the Edition De Luxe] & getting ‘the Vision’ into final shape.” These claims of completion continue.33

As the text of AVB moved from manuscript drafts to typescripts, some sections got closer to their published form more quickly than others. Most drafts are undated, but we have benefited from materials compiled by Connie and Walter Kelly Hood in their research on A Vision, and from the knowledge laid out by Connie Hood, from which the chronology of revision presented here primarily derives.³⁴ WBY began making typescripts for the new material in what became Book I in 1928. The earliest was titled “The Symbol of the Double Vortex,” and later drafts change the title to “Principal Symbols,” and then “The Double Vortex” and “Dramatis Personae.” The material for Books I and II was commingled in early typescripts, and WBY did not sort the books out until after 1932. The numbering of books was generally unclear at early stages: one draft of what would become Book III is labeled “Book IV,” and an earlier version “Notes upon Life after Death.” Rejected typescripts for what would become Book IV approach the published version earlier than other sections. And while WBY mostly used material from AVA for Book V, the ending, what he calls in the 1937 version “The End of the Cycle,” went through seven draft stages, largely composed from 1931 to 1933, though one radically different rejected draft is dated “January 7, 1934.”35 On January 27 of that year, WBY wrote to Olivia Shakespear that he had “faced at last & finished the prophesy [sic] of the next hundred years. Now Georges [sic] work begins—to draw the diagrams & the book is done.” On January 7, 1935, he wrote to Sturm that he had “left the new version of The Vision with Macmillan. They have handed it over to their excellent reader [presumably Thomas Mark], who is probably, poor man, trying to understand it.”³⁶ Meanwhile, WBY had been working on two sections of material that would form fascinating new prefaces to A Vision.

A PACKET FOR EZRA POUND (1929)

The same notebooks in which WBY was revising A Vision contain the early drafts of A Packet for Ezra Pound (Cuala, 1929). The American poet Ezra Pound and his wife, Dorothy (née Shakespear), both of them friends of both WBY and GY, had settled in the Ligurian Riviera town of Rapallo in 1924, and the Yeatses moved there in February 1928, searching for rest, sun, and warmth necessary to help WBY recuperate from illness. Almost immediately, WBY began imagining an essay about Rapallo as a new introduction to A Vision. By this time, Pound had taken up residence at via Marsala 20, and the balcony of Pound’s top-floor apartment, with its view over the Gran Caffè Rapallo to the Golfo di Tigullio, became the setting for numerous conversations between the poets—and subject matter for Packet. The Yeatses lived for many months in the Albergo Rapallo, along the sea, before moving to a flat at via Americhe 12-8, now Corso Colombo. As WBY wrote to Lady Gregory shortly after his arrival, “This is an indescribably lovely place—some little Greek town one imagines—there is a passage in Keats describing just such a town. Here I shall put off the bitterness of Irish quarrels, and write my most amiable verses. They are already, though I dare not write, crowding my head.”³⁷

Of course, Pound’s company was a huge part of the appeal of Rapallo. WBY wrote to GY on February 25, “To night Ezra & Dorothy bring me to dine with a Mrs Stein & her daughter & her son in law who is an Italian Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, & descended from Charlemagne.” Pound connected WBY with numerous modernist artists at Rapallo, including Basil Bunting, George Antheil, Gerhart Hauptmann, and Max Beerbohm. Two days after meeting the Steins mentioned above—and the son-in-law who would be described in A Packet as “an Italian prince descended from Charlemagne and no richer than the rest of us”—WBY noted, “Ezra explains his Cantos & reads me Cavalcanti & we argue about it quite amicably.”38 WBY’s letters and manuscripts show that he and Pound talked and argued about poetry, politics, the ethnographic writings of Leo Frobenius, modern music, and Wyndham Lewis’s theories of modernism.

Within the first month of his time in Rapallo, WBY began to envisage a new book about his literary community there. As he explained to Lennox Robinson, WBY’s collaborator at the Abbey Theatre, in early March 1928:

I am now working again (though only on alternate days) & what I am doing is a comment on a philosophical poem of Guido Cavalcantis, translated by Ezra Pound, which I hope to make a book of to follow your Anthology. I think of calling the book “Siris”; it is about Rapallo, Ezra & the literary movements of our time all deduced from Guido’s poem, as Berkeley in his “Siris” deduced all from tar-water.³⁹

This essay became “Rapallo,” and in early drafts WBY writes at greater length about Pound’s long work, The Cantos, than is presented in either the Cuala or Macmillan published texts. Almost immediately, WBY connected this new piece to A Vision and was referring to it as “my notes on Ezra for Cuala.”⁴⁰

During this same period, WBY was trying to explain the origin of the system, writing what would become “Introduction to ‘A Vision.’ ” He worked in September 1928 to date the first appearance of elements of the system. “Script began Oct 24, 1917. (Four days after my marriage),” he wrote, adding and then crossing out that the first cones appeared in November or December. He traced the appearance of the Great Wheel, the Four Principles, and the relationship between the spiritual cycle and the Christian Era.⁴¹ The first draft opens:

On the afternoon of October the 24, four days after my marriage my wife suggested proposed that said said she would like to attempt automatic writing. She told me afterwards that she intended to amuse me by some invented message had meant to make up messages, & having amused me for an afternoon say what she had done. She went out of her way did invent a few lines, some names & some imaginary address when her hand was, as it were, grasped by another & this came in an almost illegible in disjointed sentence in disjointed sentences in almost illegible handwriting certain startling sentences disjointed sentences in imagined his what was at first that was a development of comment about my little book “Per Amica Silentia Lunae,” . . .42

Removed from this first version and never reintroduced is the sense that GY’s first automatic writing after their wedding began as a ruse—an amusement—as if even the merest mention of such a possibility might have diminished the very real transmission invoked by a grasp of the hand. This notebook draft of the introduction does not contain the famous line “we have come to give you metaphors for poetry”—the very line that would be most quoted in early reviews of A Vision—though the line does appear in all extant subsequent autograph and typescript drafts.⁴³

By November 1928, WBY was calling the book “either ‘A Packet’ or ‘A Packet for Ezra Pound.’ ” WBY describes the contents:

It contains first a covering letter to Ezra saying that I offer him the contents, urging him not to be elected to the Senate of his country and telling him why. Then comes a long essay already finished, the introduction to the new edition of A Vision and telling all about its origin, and then I shall wind up with a description of Ezra feeding the cats (“some of them are so ungrateful” T. S. Eliot says), of Rapallo and Ezra’s poetry—some of which I greatly admire, indeed his collected edition is a great excitement to me.⁴⁴

As published, this order is reversed to begin with “Rapallo,” followed by the poem “Meditations Upon Death” (not included in A Vision), then “Introduction to the Great Wheel,” and finally the letter “To Ezra Pound,” which closes by quoting Pound’s poem “The Return” (1912).⁴⁵ “Meditations Upon Death” was a late addition.⁴⁶ Written in early February 1929, the parts of this poem would later be split into two separate poems—“At Algeciras—a Meditation upon Death” and “Mohini Chatterjee.”47 In later printings the two (separated) poems are dated “November 1928” and “1928” respectively, effectively occluding the extent to which their writing, like their subject matter, was linked to the rethinking of A Vision. A Packet for Ezra Pound was published in August 1929, in a run of 425 copies, with the usual Cuala Press blue paper boards and buff linen spine, black lettering on the front cover and on the spine of the white paper label.⁴⁸

Although A Packet ostensibly focuses on Pound and WBY’s literary relationship to him, the revelations about A Vision caught reviewers’ attention. G. W. Russell (Æ) attempted to rationalize the Instructors to whom WBY attributed the system of A Vision:

The most important part of this book is that which the poet has named “Introduction to the Great Wheel,” and in this he tells how the geometrical philosophy of the book, The Vision, came to be written. It is a collaboration between the dreaming consciousness of his wife and his own, with possibly other entities not of this plane of being. The poet speaks of them as if he believed they were external to consciousness, but when we enter into the dream world there is a dramatic sundering of the ego, and while we dream we are persuaded of the existence of many people which, when we wake, we feel were only part of our own protean nature. I do not suggest that these philosophic entities who communicated to the poet and his wife the substance of The Vision may be simply some submerged part of the soul, because I am skeptical of the possibility. I merely say that the poet has not given me enough material to decide.⁴⁹

Writing in Commonweal, Seán Ó Faoláin expressed skepticism that the poems deriving from WBY’s spiritual experiments—especially those in The Cat and the Moon (1924)—could match his earliest verse, where “there was an air of the other world that was far more charming and far more persuasive,” concluding that “[t]here is a great gap between spirits and spirituality, and none of Mr. Yeats’s spiritistic verse has succeeded in bridging it.” Similarly, in The Nation, he described WBY as “exchanging the fairies of Sligo for the spooks of Soho” and suggested that WBY’s account would be “of some interest to the psychologist if of none to the literary man.” His harsh review speaks to the conundrum WBY concocts for his readers:

It is hard on Yeats’s admirers: he invents a world of unattractive spooks, then invents stories about it to give it color, then writes poems that are only intelligible when read with these invented stories, and for the sake of the verse we put up with the story and the spooks only to be told of a sudden that it was a foolish story anyway and that the spooks had misled him.50

These same concerns and questions about A Vision and its relationship to WBY’s other writings would permeate reviews of the 1937 edition. Given the extent to which the poems of such volumes as The Tower and The Winding Stair, and indeed much of WBY’s late poetry, builds on the system of A Vision, Ó Faoláin’s assessment seems limited indeed.

STORIES OF MICHAEL ROBARTES AND HIS FRIENDS (1931)

By 1930 or so, WBY was also writing what would become Stories of Michael Robartes and his Friends: An Extract from a Record Made by his Pupils: And a Play in Prose (Cuala, 1931). In a notebook, WBY drafted the stories of Denise de L’Isle Adam, Huddon, Duddon, and Daniel O’Leary; Michael Robartes and Owen Aherne; and Mary Bell and John Bond. He played around with framing fictions:

Stories of Michael Robartes his Friends a letter

from Daniel O’Leary + John Aherne edited by WBYeats

an extract from a manuscript book compiled by

May 1924

Dear Mr. Duddon Aherne,

WBY imagined an epistolary story—but would it be told by Daniel O’Leary or John Aherne? Sent to Duddon or Owen Aherne? And what was WBY’s role to be—editor? compiler? possessor of a manuscript book? At the end of what would become the letter to WBY by John Aherne (see 38–40), WBY wrote and then struck through a potential postscript:

PS. I enclose some photographs Duddon took of Wood Cuts in Speculum. He says that Gyraldus is in portrait so like you that he may have been one of your incarnations. I cannot myself see the resemblance.51

Like the fictions of AVA, these framing devices play with notions of authorship and trouble the lines between fiction and reality, always with humor.

Published in March 1932, Stories saw a run of 450 copies.⁵² The illustration of the unicorn and star, made for AVA-Laurie by Edmund Dulac and retained in AVB, appears on the title page. As with A Packet, the Cuala Stories differs somewhat from A Vision. It opens with “Huddon, Duddon and Daniel O’Leary,” printed in red. Then follows John Duddon’s story that incorporates the finding of Giraldus’ Speculum Angelorum et Hominum as narrated in Owen Aherne’s “Introduction” to A Vision (1925).⁵³ This story introduces an array of other characters, all of whom have some relationship to Aherne and Robartes, and whose fantastical stories echo the material in A Vision and of the framing material of AVA. In Stories, Denise de L’Isle Adam is interrupted before she can tell her own story (see 30–31). Next comes a letter from John Aherne (brother of Owen) to WBY, disputing “the facts” in “The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid,” attempting to understand the automatic script in terms of Platonic notions of memory, and noting his brother Owen’s bitterness about his depiction in WBY’s stories. John Aherne compares the two versions of WBY’s “diagrams and explanations” to find no essential difference, leading WBY, acting as a sort of editor, to note: “I published in 1925 an inaccurate, obscure, incomplete book, called ‘A Vision.’ It lies beside me now, corrected, clarified and completed after five years’ work and thought.”⁵⁴ Perhaps recognizing the additional seven years’ work needed to complete A Vision, and perhaps wanting to minimize his own intrusion, WBY removed this note from the 1937 text. Otherwise, all these texts appear in AVB. Stories concludes with WBY’s play The Resurrection, not included in AVB.

As Connie K. Hood notes, plans by Macmillan for a multivolume Edition de Luxe of WBY’s works may have made the Stories material part of A Vision. In December 1930, WBY proposed a volume containing

1. The two little volumes of “Diaries” published at Cuala.

2. A collection of philosophic stories about to be published at Cuala.

3. “A Packet for Ezra Pound” published at Cuala two years ago.

4. “A Vision” published privately by Werner Laurie in, I think, 1922 or 23.

These four sections support each other. “A Vision” is not the crude book published by Laurie; I have worked years on it since then. The philosophic stories, which were written this summer and are amongst the best things I have written, expound its fundamental ideas. “A Packet for Ezra Pound” is the introduction to “A Vision” and the “Diaries” which are probably my best critical writings have sufficient relation to it not to seem out of harmony. I don’t want to publish “A Vision” by itself for various reasons.55

Hood identifies the two “little volumes of ‘Diaries’ ” as Estrangement (Cuala, 1926) and The Death of Synge, and Other Passages from an Old Diary (Cuala, 1928). She consulted the setting copy of Stories in Michael B. Yeats’s collection, but that volume has not become a part of the Yeatses’ library in the NLI, and we have not consulted it. Most of the markings in this copy pertain to changes in house style, meaning that most of the differences between Stories and A Vision unfolded at some galley or proof stage.⁵⁶

If the new “Introduction to ‘A Vision’ ” from A Packet clears away the old fictions of AVA, Stories and its “strange disorderly people” (as WBY called the characters in a letter to Dorothy Wellesley) bring them back.⁵⁷ Reviewers of Stories recognized the connections to AVA. Charles Powell noted that with this book, “Mr. Yeats returns to his unresting inquiry into the truth about the life of the mind and the life of the soul, and treads again the mystic, psychic, magic ground of the earlier stories of Michael Robartes and Owen Traherne [sic].” And Austin Clarke observed an irony, that “The obscurity of Mr. Yeats’s thought has taken refuge nowadays in his prose, and it is noteworthy that we must turn to his poetry for explanation,” adding that here “the curious will find matter for ingenious speculation.”58 The incorporation of these stories into A Vision only multiplied this speculation.

PUBLICATION PROCESS FOR THE 1937 EDITION

The materials sent to Macmillan in December 1935 as the basis of this new version of A Vision convey how the volume was pieced together from previously published and new material. These included copy no. 498 of AVA-Laurie, marked on its cover “Book A,” to serve as setting copy for those parts of the text copied from the first version. Also included were copies of the Packet and Stories to serve as setting copy for the material from these volumes. Finally, there was a typescript for the new material, to replace what was cut from the first version of A Vision. Not all of these materials are still in existence. The Yeats Library in the National Library of Ireland retains the copy of AVA-Laurie sent to Macmillan; the printer’s copy of Packet is in the Yeats Collection in the Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library at Emory University.⁵⁹ As noted above, the copy of Stories used as setting copy was once held in the collection of Michael B. Yeats, but its current location is unknown. The setting typescript for the new material has largely been lost, although the first twelve pages were unearthed at Basingstoke by Warwick Gould, who sent a photocopy of them to Connie K. Hood. Her research revealed that these pages correspond to NLI 36,272/6.⁶⁰ This carbon typescript is mostly complete, though it does not include text for sections X–XVIII of “Book IV: The Great Year of the Ancients” (186–92). The Basingstoke typescript includes numerous manuscript additions and changes, which were not copied to the carbon typescript; nor were the diagrams, for which spaces were left in the typescript. Additionally, the galleys and page proofs for this edition are lost. That there is not a complete extant setting copy for A Vision (1937) creates editorial problems that we enumerate later in this introduction.

Some sections were more complete at the time of the mailing of the typescript than others. Judging from the section of carbon typescript available for “Book IV,” that book was hardly revised after submission to Macmillan. By contrast, the addition to “Dove or Swan” entitled “The End of Cycle” bears only small resemblance to that of the carbon typescript.

The Basis of the 1937 Edition

Pages in this edition	Pages in 1937 edition	Section description	Textual basis
3–22	1–30	“A Packet for Ezra Pound”	Packet; MARBL copy
23–40	31–38, 40–55	“Stories of Michael Robartes and his Friends: An Extract from a Record Made by his Pupils”	Stories; copy previously in collection of Michael B. Yeats
28	39	illustration: “Portrait of Giraldus”	AVA-Laurie #498 (YL 2433c)
41–47	57–64	“The Phases of the Moon”	AVA-Laurie #498 (YL 2433c)
48	66	illustration: “The Great Wheel”	AVA-Laurie #498 (YL 2433c)
49–66	67–89	“Book I: The Great Wheel”: Part I, Part II sec. I–V	Basingstoke TS [NLI 36,272/6/1a]
66–136	90–184	“Book I: The Great Wheel”: Part II sec. VI–XVII, Part III	AVA-Laurie #498 (YL 2433c)
137–58	185–215	“Book II: The Completed Symbol”	lost TS [NLI 36,272/6/1b]
159–75	217–40	“Book III: The Soul in Judgment”	lost TS [NLI 36,272/6/2a]
177–85	241–54	“Book IV: The Great Year of the Ancients”: sec. I–IX	lost TS [NLI 36,272/6/2b]
186–92	255–63	“Book IV: The Great Year of the Ancients”: sec. X–XVIII	lost TS, no carbon in NLI
193–218	265–300	“Book V: Dove or Swan”	AVA-Laurie #498 (YL 2433c)
219–20	301–2	“The End of the Cycle”	lost TS [NLI 36,272/6/2c?]
221–24	303–5	“All Souls’ Night: An Epilogue”	AVA-Laurie #498 (YL 2433c)

WBY began reading proofs for A Vision in early 1935.61 Given his propensity for revision on galleys, it is particularly regrettable that these have not been preserved. In part because of WBY’s weakness due to illness, Macmillan offered to have some proofs read in house, and WBY accepted. There were numerous concerns about the placement of diagrams. Paged proofs came in early 1936, and again WBY’s illness interfered, so that on February 11 GY sent a telegraph to Watt: “TELL MACMILLAN IMPOSSIBLE YEATS CORRECT PROOFS STOP ASK MR MARKS [sic] PASS THEM FOR PRESS = YEATS +.”⁶² Despite continuing difficulties with proofs, by early September 1937 all proofs were reviewed, and the book was published by Macmillan of London on October 7, 1937, in decorated black and brown paper boards bound in a black cloth spine with gold lettering, in an edition of 1,500 copies. On its frontispiece is a portrait of WBY by Augustus John. Illustrations of Giraldus, the unicorn, and the Great Wheel by Edmund Dulac remain from the first edition, as does the two-color design of the Historical Cones. The American edition, published on February 23, 1938, by Macmillan of New York, was prepared from the pages of the London edition, with some small stylistic changes. With a cover of black cloth with a light green cloth spine, lettering blind on the front cover and in silver on the spine, it appeared in an edition of 1,200 copies.⁶³ The Yeatses had copies of both these printings in their library, and textual corrections have been marked in both (YL 2434 and 2435). Even so, about a year after the book was published, WBY complained to the novelist Ethel Mannin that A Vision still had not encompassed all that he had come to understand from his communicators.⁶⁴ Given the chance, WBY would no doubt have further revised, perhaps producing a third edition.

RECEPTION OF THE 1937 EDITION

The new 1937 edition was not particularly well received. Most reviewers did not try to make sense of the Yeatses’ system but focused on the materials from Packet, occasionally noting which famous writers were assigned to which phase. Searching for antecedents for WBY’s endeavor, reviewers compared his work to the prophetic works of William Blake, The Anatomy of Melancholy of Robert Burton, the revelations of Emanuel Swedenborg and Thomas Lake Harris, the shorter works of Sir Thomas Browne, The Caprices and Disasters of War by Francisco Goya, and the encyclopedic tendency of Oswald Spengler. The occult novelist and theologian Charles Williams was one of the few to grapple with the book as a whole, seeing its matter as inseparable from a style that “imposes attention on his readers; no other living writer arouses so easily a sense of reverie moving into accurate power.”65

Most reviewers commented on the difficulty of A Vision. Geoffrey Grigson wrote in his own New Verse that the book “remains an entirely impossible monster.” Michael Roberts (whose nominal likeness to Michael Robartes we must take as coincidence) worried that WBY wrote “in terms that many readers will find distracting and confusing.” Kerker Quinn opened by claiming, “Mr. Yeats’s new volumes will convince many that he has gone unquestionably, though perhaps serviceably, mad.” Mary M. Colum agreed: “If we did not know Mr. Yeats to be a very sane man, we should regard his revelations as having come over from that other region where the mind is no longer in control and where what little individual consciousness we mortals have becomes more and more diminished.” She acknowledged, “I understand very little of this book,” noting with amazement that “Mr. Yeats undoubtedly believes that a number of readers will devote their whole intellectual lives to a study of A Vision and its conclusions.” Horace Reynolds suggested that WBY “seems to crave and demand the stimulation of difficulty as some other poets have demanded drink and drugs,” and he could not be sure whether the book reveals that “Yeats hasn’t a stime of a sense of humor, or—a Gargantuan one.”⁶⁶ Was the book a joke or an admission of insanity, a challenge to readers or an expression of disdain?

Reviewers worried about the implication in the system that there is no free will. In a review entitled “Doom,” Michael Williams read A Vision as of “the literature of pessimism,” noting its emphasis on “one of the oldest and most ruinous illusions of humanity—the awful nightmare of doom, the idea of ‘Eternal Recurrence.’ ” He described A Vision as

the utter denial of the Christian revelation, the negation, indeed, of all belief in God. Man’s free will is banished in such a system. The “great wheel” of life merely turns and re-turns, forever, through cycle after cycle, so that each and every human soul, born again and again without cessation into different environments, will go on doing so eternally.

Reynolds claimed that the system disallows free will in individual or communal life, noting that “[b]oth man and civilization are as fated and destiny determined as a tragic character in the mind of Shakespeare.” Seán Ó Faoláin lamented, “There is no ethic, no morality.”67

The story of the communication with spirits featured in most reviews. William Rose Benét called WBY “the most psychic of Celts.” Stephen Spender wrote: “The spirit which made this remark deserves a literary prize, for not only is it responsible for some of the greatest poetry in the English language, but also it has provided a valuable hint towards the critical attitude which the reader may perhaps—fortified by that voice from the ‘other world’—take up towards A Vision.” E. A. Cazamian noted that “the uninitiated reader will find much to pique his curiosity in these pages, where the poet retraces the history of his engagement with the spirit world, thanks to the aptitude for automatic writing first revealed in his young wife.”⁶⁸ So central is this material to the book, Edmund Wilson suggested, that A Vision “will be of relatively little interest to anybody but spiritualists and theosophists.” Michael Roberts similarly acknowledged the difficulty of explaining “poetic inspiration” in terms of automatic writing, spirit instructors, and frustrators, since such material reminds most readers “of spiritualistic claptrap and bogus religions,” but was a rare reviewer to acknowledge GY’s role as “perhaps the most significant revelation of the book.”⁶⁹

Of great interest was WBY’s discussion of his own belief in the system he had created (see 19). Roberts distinguished WBY’s own “personal myths” from “scientific theories,” concluding that “if [these myths] are to be effective, there must be moments when the poet takes them as being true in every sense.” Wilson worried that WBY might “be thought to take his ‘vision’ too literally.” Grigson proclaimed that despite whatever WBY might have gained from the instructors, “quack remains quack.”⁷⁰

Given the importance of both poets by this time, it is not surprising that WBY’s commentary on Pound and his Cantos would matter. Wilson noted that the volume “throws some light on Pound’s design in his ‘Cantos,’ ” and Babette Deutsch called WBY’s comments on The Cantos one of the most valuable parts of a book she largely dismissed as “tedious.” Eda Lou Walton described the book as containing “the most complete account, received directly from Pound, of what he is doing with his Cantos.” The reviewer for The Illustrated London News took consolation that just as he had been baffled by A Vision and “[j]ust as Æ was disconcerted by Yeats’ visionary philosophy, so Yeats himself appears puzzled by another poet’s magnum opus, continued in The Fifth Decad of Cantos.”71

Many wondered how to understand A Vision as a description of a wider political reality. Quinn highlighted “any number of piercing comments of men and times,” though he wondered “[h]ow much or how little ‘A Vision’ may eventually be found to contribute to study of complex human nature and changing society.” Grigson similarly asked, “[H]ow much hold of reality and justice is there in Yeats now?” adding that “[r]espect for an able and aged poet does not preclude scepticism about his opinions.” Grigson used WBY’s own complicated political stances—his celebration of his Anglo-Irish background, his tendency to admire fascism—to offer his own views:

The value of Yeats is nothing but the sum of his expressed moments of reality: the value of Communism, or the value of Fascism, is the sum of its working truths or realities. What is shocking about Yeats is asking us to declare only for Reality, in general, in the singular. All things fall and are built again. How comfortable! We have no right to listen to Yeats, no right at least to stay outside. To be free as a poet, to be free and to be allowed to have Reality in view, enjoins upon us, that, as clearly as we can with our imperfections of reason and sensibility, we must recognise, and not evade, realities of the present. We must risk (this is for Eliot as well as Yeats) having bad press with posterity; or else Beauty in view becomes a beast.⁷²

Perhaps following WBY’s own lead (see 14, 189–91), several reviewers considered connections between A Vision and Oswald Spengler’s writings. Roberts called the book “a stranger version of Spengler,” and J. Bronowski acknowledged the book’s likeness to “Spengler’s shabby system of history.” For Stephen Spender, however, the parallel had implications beyond mere literary likeness:

Spengler, Stefan George, D’Annunzio, Yeats: is it really so impossible to guess at the “instructors” who speak behind these mystic veils? It is interesting, too, to speculate whether Fascism may not work out through writers such as these a mystery which fills its present yawning void of any myth, religion, law, or even legal constitution, which are not improvised.73

Given WBY’s insistence on connections among these various elements of his Vision, reviewers’ concerns testify to the seriousness with which this new version was read, as well as to the complicated motives that could underlie the explanation WBY attempted.

For most reviewers, however, the only way to assess the value of the book was through WBY’s poetry. R. C. Bald, in a brief note in the Philosophical Review, concluded that “the symbolism has a validity, if only because it has provided a mould for the thought of one of the most sensitive minds of modern times.” For Bronowski, the superiority of the poetry over anything in A Vision called into question the usefulness of, say, the exposition of “the mystic meanings of the twenty-eight phases of the moon” since “nothing in the book gives these meanings as richly as the poem The Phases of the Moon.” An anonymous reviewer in The New Statesman and Nation agreed, concluding that “prolonged struggles with the ‘system’ and comparisons with those poems in which the same symbols are used suggest that their significance is not increased by the confused notions of gyres and phases, lunar cycles and zodiacal houses, in which Mr. Yeats’ psychic dictators materialise their mediaeval doctrine of fundamental antinomies and revolutions.”⁷⁴ William Rose Benét confessed similar preferences, admitting that “[p]erhaps it is a limitation of my mind that it can consign the diagram of the Historical Cones to limbo since, on the facing page, stands that superb poem concerning Leda—and I had rather read ‘All Souls’ Night’ at the end of the book than the thorough-going explication of all the symbolism of the ‘Vision.’ ” Spender judged that A Vision can “only assume shape and significance in Mr. Yeats’s poetry.” H. T. Hunt Grubb put these propositions to a test, reading the “wonderful mechanism” of A Vision through WBY’s wide corpus of writings. And although he had raised concerns about the exposition of the system in A Vision, Seán Ó Faoláin concluded that “nobody who would read these poems in mood with the poet, extract from them the ultimate pleasure of the implications and overtones, can afford not to wind his way, with this book, into their cavern-sources in one of the most complex and solitary minds among lyric poets since the death of Keats.”75

EDITIONS AFTER 1937

Editions of A Vision pursued and published after the death of WBY have become a part of its history. Beginning in 1930, Macmillan planned an Edition de Luxe of the works of WBY, an edition that at GY’s suggestion came to be called “the Coole Edition.”⁷⁶ During the last years of WBY’s life, plans were made for the volumes’ contents, and while WBY read proofs for some volumes, numerous delays kept Macmillan of London from releasing any. After WBY’s death, work restarted in earnest. The edition by this point was to have eleven volumes, and volume IX, “Discoveries,” would include A Vision.⁷⁷ On June 26, 1939, Thomas Mark mailed GY proofs for VIII, IX, and X, “Mythologies,” “Discoveries,” and “Essays,” noting that only the proofs for Volume VIII had been read by WBY. She read them and replied to his questions and suggestions, and on July 14, 1939, Mark acknowledged return of the proofs for Volume IX. These proofs, housed in the Macmillan archive at the British Library (BL Add. 55893), contain a number of corrections marked by GY and Mark, aimed toward perfecting the 1937 text of A Vision.⁷⁸

These proofs contain various types of changes. A few were authorized by WBY before his death and marked in his own hand in the Yeatses’ copies of A Vision. Some are changes noted in GY’s hand in these same printed copies. Others are changes suggested by Thomas Mark and accepted by GY. Some changes attempt to make the headnotes for the descriptions of the phases in Part III of Book I (79–136) correspond to the descriptions of the same phases in the Table of the Four Faculties (71–73). Others correct errors, such as the spelling of authors’ names, foreign words, and the rendering of quotations from other works. Some recognize shifts in the wider historical context, as when “the present Pope” was to be changed to “Pope Pius XI” (157). The texts of poems are made to match the definitive edition, that is, the first volume of the Coole Edition. Other changes facilitate reading: for instance, parenthetical page references are inserted beside mentions of diagrams. A few changes improve or correct the description of the system itself. For instance, in 1937, an often-quoted and frequently puzzling sentence describes the concept closest to the idea of God: “The particulars are the work of the thirteenth sphere or cycle which is in every man and called by every man his freedom.” In the Coole proofs and here, the sphere (which according to the system is beyond human comprehension) is replaced by the cone, that is, its shape when apprehended from a mortal perspective: “The particulars are the work of the Thirteenth Cone or cycle which is in every man and called by every man his freedom” (219–20). Finally, there are changes aiming to bring the text into alignment with Macmillan house style. Mark prepared a second pull of Coole proofs (BL Add. 55886), incorporating most but not all of the corrections. Most of these changes were never incorporated into a published version of A Vision, but as they remain a part of its textual history, we have included them in Appendix 1, Table 3, so that readers can compare this imagined version of A Vision with those published.

By the autumn of 1939, plans for the Coole Edition were put on hold. On October 17, 1939, Harold Macmillan wrote to GY, noting that “the present state of the publishing world is so difficult that I feel it would be in the best interest of Mr. Yeat’s [sic] poems and plays if we postpone publication until early 1940.”79 Thomas Mark similarly acknowledged the effect of the onset of the war on the book market, writing to GY two days later that “[t]he Coole edition has to wait for better times,” but wondering if it might be possible nonetheless for GY to continue with the proofs for Volume XI. Even after the war, however, the full Coole edition was never produced, with the Poems (1949) volume the only published result of this endeavor.⁸⁰

In the 1950s, Macmillan of New York planned for a corrected reissue of A Vision. When GY corrected the first-pull Coole proofs, she had also marked a number of corrections in her copy of A Vision (1937, YL 2434), labeling it “Partially | corrected copy | July 1939.” Connie K. Hood notes that on April 17, 1956, GY sent a copy of the 1938 New York text, with these same corrections marked, as setting copy for this partially corrected reissue of the text; all these corrections are noted in our Appendix 1, Tables 1–2.81 Issued in dark blue cloth binding, with white endpapers and silver lettering on the spine, this edition was printed in 1,500 copies. Macmillan of London then used the New York sheets to print its own edition on December 7, 1961.⁸²

In the early 1960s, interest in a corrected reissue of A Vision returned. On the second-pull Coole proofs, Mark made a fresh set of corrections, ignoring many of the corrections from the first pull of proofs (see Appendix 1, Table 3). These proofs begin at page 59 (41 of the current edition), thereby excluding “A Packet for Ezra Pound” and “Stories of Michael Robartes and his Friends.”⁸³ Thomas Mark seems to have compared these proofs with the 1956 New York reissue, aiming to reconcile this text with that edition. Mark kept a notebook (see Appendix 1, Table 3), in which he noted changes made for the new 1962 edition; it includes only a small fraction of those imagined at the Coole proof stage. In 1962, Macmillan of London issued a new version of A Vision. These proofs were not its basis, because the text was a “corrected” printing of the 1937 edition. Some had been agreed on by Mark and George Yeats in their work on the Coole proofs. Others brought the volume into line with Macmillan house style. As Connie K. Hood summarizes:

Thus, the 1962 reissue was a syncretic text, based partly on Mark’s re-editing of Mrs. Yeats’s editing of the 1956 reissue and partly on their joint editing of the Coole proofs; the 1956 reissue was itself based on Mrs. Yeats’s re-editing of Yeats’s editing of the 1937 edition and possibly on the editing of the Scribner edition by Mrs. Yeats, Yeats, or both; and Mrs. Yeats’s re-editing of Yeats’s editing of the 1937 edition was based on the editing by Mrs. Yeats and Thomas Mark of the Coole proofs: A Vision had become a modern palimpsest.⁸⁴

By this point, we are many textual stages away from the 1937 edition of A Vision, the final version of the text over which W. B. Yeats had “authorial” control.

EDITORIAL PRINCIPLES AND APPARATUS FOR THIS VOLUME

The current edition of A Vision faces two large sets of challenges in a series invested in the authorial intentions of WBY. First is the difficulty of ascertaining his intentions in the last version of the text published in his lifetime. Second is the question of what to do with emendations made to that text by trusted collaborators after his death. When combined, these challenges make the ideal of a perfected text impossible.

First, we struggle with the difficulty of critical assessment of authorial intentions. As noted (xxxix), we do not have a complete setting copy for the 1937 printing of A Vision. Some parts survive: the NLI has copy #498 of AVA-Laurie (YL 2433c), and the copy of Packet used for setting is held in the Manuscript and Rare Book Library at Emory, and thanks to Connie K. Hood and Warwick Gould we have a photocopy of the first twelve pages of the setting-copy typescript from Basingstoke. Some parts exist in imperfect form: NLI 36,272/6 has been identified as a carbon of the setting-copy typescript, and although it lacks all inked corrections, additions, and diagrams, it offers some impression of the setting typescript. While the copy of Stories used as setting copy cannot be located, we have Connie Hood’s notes and other copies of that text. Other parts, however, are completely lost: no galleys or proofs survive (typically the locus of many revisions), and even the carbon of the setting typescript for sections X–XVIII of Book IV is lost. Establishing WBY’s real “intentions,” therefore, is difficult at best. More important, there are numerous significant and often lengthy disparities between the carbon of the setting-copy typescript and the text as it appears in the 1937 edition, likely because of WBY’s late-stage revisions. For our edition, we have had to rely on the text as printed by Macmillan in 1937, but it is frequently impossible to ascertain where printers’ errors might have been introduced into the text—that is to say, where WBY’s intentions were not followed. While we have not attempted to give full account of the many manuscript and typescript draft stages of this revised Vision, we have noted disparities between the printed text of 1937 and the carbon of the setting typescript in our annotations, reserving the most substantial variants for Appendix II, so that readers of this edition may reflect on relationships among the extant testaments to WBY’s intentions and process.

Second, there is the problem of the corrections made to the text after WBY’s death. There are three corrections marked in his hand in the Yeatses’ copies of A Vision (1937), and presumably these may be taken as authoritative. But to what degree are changes marked in those same copies in GY’s hand a reflection of WBY’s wishes, or of her profound understanding of the system of A Vision, which she helped create? Are we to accept GY as an author of equal standing? She was, of course, the main “writer” of the original materials for the book, although her contributions were almost entirely mediumistic; by the 1930s, automatic sessions were rare, though WBY still relied on her (and to some extent also the spirit instructors) for consultation about details of the system. Her marking of corrections in the same copies as WBY argues for her semi-authorial status. And as for Thomas Mark, does his “permission” to correct A Vision expire with WBY’s death, or could we take his corrections as well?

We have charted a conservative course, keeping our emendations minimal, noting all in Appendix 1, Table 4. In that same Appendix, Tables 1 and 2 compile changes marked by the Yeatses in their copies of A Vision (1937, YL 2434; and 1938, YL 2435), and these tables also note changes made in the copy of A Vision (1938) in the Alspach collection. Table 3 compiles corrections proposed for or made in posthumous editions of A Vision, comparing them with the 1937 text. These apparatuses allow readers both to reconstruct different published and imagined states of the text, and to consider our own editorial practice, and thereby to ruminate over the textual authority of Thomas Mark and GY while seeing what text WBY left behind. Just as our edition of AVA aimed to represent that text’s appearance at publication in January 1926, the current volume offers insight into the reimagining of the work and its later states of presentation. We hope that in these two volumes, readers of WBY and the Yeatses’ system will have the tools needed to understand the changes in the system and its textual representation, and what kind of framing WBY believed it requires.

Although all our emendations are noted in Appendix 1, Table 4, we explain our principles here. As Connie K. Hood has rightly noted, WBY’s texts were wildly inconsistent: despite his desire for internal consistency, he revised continually, meaning that “some problems with consistency in meaning in the 1937 edition arise because the materials represent several stages of the creative process captured simultaneously in print.” Additionally, errors were introduced by his typists attempting to represent accurately his dictation and his nearly illegible manuscript drafts.85 And unfortunately for all his editors, WBY resisted proofreading. We have accepted most corrections that appear in the Yeatses’ copies of A Vision (1937, YL 2434; and 1938, YL 2435) and those noted in the copy of A Vision (1938) in the Alspach collection (see Appendix 1, Tables 1 and 2). Because of GY’s co-authorship of the system of A Vision, we have accepted her corrections as well as WBY’s. In keeping with established series policy, we have not incorporated Thomas Mark’s corrections, but because WBY frequently deferred to Mark on matters of mechanics, we have included his corrections to the Coole proofs, the corrections marked in his notebook, and the text as printed in 1962 in Table 3.⁸⁶

Some terminology has been standardized, as in AVA. Readers are often reminded that these are precise technical terms, and we have honored that aim by standardizing the capitalization and italicization of the following terms: antithetical, Daimon, Ghostly Self, Head, Heart, Hodos Chameliontos, Phase (when referring to a specifically numbered phase) and phase (when being used generally), primary, the Four Principles (Celestial Body, Husk, Passionate Body, Spirit), and True and False when they are used with respect to Faculties. Will, one of the Four Faculties (Body of Fate, Creative Mind, Mask, and Will), is not regularized with the others. Since WBY also uses the word “will” in its ordinary sense, and it is not always clear whether he refers to the common concept or the specialized term, we have yielded to the authority of the copy text for this word. Where typically italicized terminology occurs in italicized passages, we have not romanized. Additionally, and in keeping with our practice in AVA, we have several other minor emendations, standardizing the punctuation of titles, the spelling of proper names, the Anglicization of Cyrillic names, and reference marks for WBY’s notes. We have kept the punctuation of the Macmillan copy text and WBY’s drafts, though we use U.S. conventions for editorial text, including notes. All emendations are noted in Appendix 1, Table 4.