NOTES

Editors’ Introduction

1 Harold Macmillan to H[ansard] Watt, December 31, 1934, BL Add. 55761 f. 462.

2 “The Visionary Yeats,” The New Statesman (March 27, 1926), 750; [Ernest de Selincourt], “Mr. Yeats’s Occultism,” Times Literary Supplement 25:1266 (April 22, 1926), 296; and Edmund Wilson, “Yeats’s Guide to the Soul,” The New Republic 57:737 (January 16, 1929), 249–51.

3 [G. R. S. Mead], “A Vision,” The Quest 18:1 (October 1926), 96–98.

4 WBY to Olivia Shakespear, September 13 [postmark 1929], L 768; WBY to Olivia Shakespear, February [postmark February 9, 1931], L 781.

5 Drafted material in the NLI, containing over a thousand sheets, is contained in manuscripts 36,272/1–36,272/33.

6 NLI 13,576, Notebook begun April 7, 1921, containing Vision material and diary entries.

7 The “Introduction to the Great Wheel” in Packet became, with few changes, the “Introduction to ‘A Vision’ ” in AVB.

8 See this edition, 10 and 15.

9 WBY marked in books he read, so a fairly reliable guide to which books and passages interested him may be found in books he owned. The Yeatses’ personal library, now housed in the National Library of Ireland, is described in The Library of William Butler Yeats: Guide for Readers (http://www.nli.ie/pdfs/mss%20lists/Yeats%20Librarylistforpublic.pdf); O’Shea; Wayne C. Chapman: The W. B. and George Yeats Library: A Short-Title Catalog (Clemson: Clemson University Digital Press, 2006; http://www.clemson.edu/cedp/cudp/pubs/YeatsSTC/). See also Edward O’Shea, “The 1920s Catalogue of W. B. Yeats’s Library,” YA 4 (1986), ed. Warwick Gould, 279–90.

10 See for example LWBY/GY 162–63; LTSM 60–126 passim.

11 WBY wrote many letters about his reading of Lewis: see, for example, CL InteLex 5048, 5055, 5076, and 5097.

12 William David Soud notes that “Yeats’s letters and other writings from the time offer an extensive list [of Hindu texts]: the Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali, the Bhakti Sūtras of Narada, the Bhagavad Gītā, the autobiography of Bahinabai, and, much later, the Avadhūta Gītā” (“Toward a Divinised Poetics: God, Self, and Poiesis in W. B. Yeats, David Jones, and T. S. Eliot,” PhD diss., University of Oxford, 2013, 59).

13 These essays are collected in Wheels and Butterflies (in WBY’s terminology, the short plays are the “butterflies” and the deliberately provocative introductory essays the “wheels”) and are reprinted as appendices in Plays; the quotations are from 721 and 725.

14 Le système du monde, histoire des doctrines cosmologiques de Platon à Copernic (10 vols.; Paris: Hermann, 1913–59).

15 CL InteLex 7117.

16 WBY to GY, October 22, 1931, and April 4, 1932, LWBY/GY 259 and 311.

17 See LWBY/GY 277, Foster 2:427, YL 881 and 2122.

18 AVA lv-lvi.

19 These are YL 2433, 2433a, 2433b, and 2433c. See AVA 339–52.

20 Frank Pearce Sturm to WBY, January 19, 1926, FPS 87. Sturm refers to Book II of AVA, “What the Caliph Refused to Learn”; see AVA 95–143. See 51 and note.

21 WBY to Frank Pearce Sturm, March 1, 1926, FPS 98.

22 NLI 13,576.

23 WBY to Ignatius McHugh, May 26 [1926], CL InteLex 4874.

24 See leaf 8 of the 1921 notebook, dated “Jun 8” and following an entry of May 28, 1926, on E. M. Plunkett to be added to A Vision (NLI 13,576).

25 Leaf 8v, referring to sections IX, “The Beatitude,” and XII, “The Spirits at Fifteen and at One,” of Book IV, “The Gates of Pluto.” See AVA 193–94, 198–201.

26 See, for instance, leaf 3, Rapallo Notebook C (NLI 13,580).

27 NLI 13,576, leaf [24]. See AVA 128–30.

28 WBY to Olivia Shakespear, May 25 [1926], CL InteLex 4871.

29 NLI 13,576, leaves [11v] and [12] and following.

30 NLI 13,576, leaf 24v. See AVA 109–12.

31 NLI 13,576, leaves 31 and 31v. The issue seems concerned with WBY’s attempt to integrate the start of the Great Year, when equinoxes and star markers coincided, with the system’s other cycles (AVA 114–28 gives an earlier conception, and see this volume 184 and 186). He faced a variety of circles marked out either in phases, zodiac signs, or compass points, some offset from each other by ninety degrees and possibly running in opposite directions. As the comment that, in Dulac’s woodcut, “the East is marked by a sceptre” (188) indicates, Phase 22 in the circle of the phases coincides with East and Aries, and South at Phase 15 with Capricorn (see AVA 114ff). This, however, is the lunar alignment, and WBY thought the Great Year should possibly be measured by the solar version in which East and the start of Aries coincide with the center of Phase 15 (“Lunar South is Solar East”; see 138, 146n, and 183). After publishing AVA, he had also concluded that the solar zodiac ran in the opposite direction to the lunar one (causing alterations: see 344–45 n1, #4). The diary entry indicates that, at this point, WBY favored the lunar Aries coinciding with Phase 22 as the starting point.

32 WBY to Maud Gonne, October 7, 1927, CL InteLex 5036, and October 25, 1927, CL InteLex 5039. See 375–76 n163 of this edition. WBY to Lady Gregory, March 12 [1928], CL InteLex 5089. See also a later letter to Lady Gregory, April 1 [1928], CL InteLex 5097. WBY to Jack Lindsay, April 2 [1928], CL InteLex 5098. LWBY/GY 205. Dionertes is one of the Controls in the automatic experiments. WBY to Olivia Shakespear, September 13 [1929], CL InteLex 5285. WBY to Sturm, FPS 100.

33 WBY to Olivia Shakespear, February (postmark February 9, 1931), L 781. WBY refers to Allan Duncan; see CL InteLex 5455. WBY to GY, October 13 [1931], LWBY/GY 253. The Cicero passage appears on 178. This passage provided the subject for a good bit of the Yeatses’ correspondence of October 1931: see LWBY/GY 253–58. For other, later claims of completion, see L 788, 812, 819; LWBY/GY 311.

34 See Hood, “Search” and “Remaking,” esp. 48–52.

35 See NLI 36,272/8–33. On the (undated) version WBY titled “Michael Robartes Foretells,” see Walter Kelly Hood, “Michael Robartes: Two Occult Manuscripts,” YO 204–24.

36 WBY to Olivia Shakespear, January 27 [1934], CL InteLex 5998. WBY to Frank Pearce Sturm, January 7, 1935, FPS 105.

37 WBY to Lady Gregory, [February 24, 1928], L 738.

38 WBY to GY, [February 25, 1928] and February 27 [1928], LWBY/GY 190–91.

39 WBY to Lennox Robinson, March 10 [1928], CL InteLex 5088.

40 Rapallo Notebook B (NLI 13,579, leaf 1). For more extensive treatment of these drafts, WBY’s treatment of Pound therein, and their relationship to A Vision, see Paul. WBY to Olivia Shakespear, August 2 [1928], CL InteLex 5142. See also L 739, 748.

41 WBY, Rapallo Notebook C (NLI 13,580, leaf [2]).

42 WBY, “Introduction,” Rapallo Notebook B (NLI 13,579, leaf [83]).

43 See, for instance, NLI 30,757, NLI 30,758, NLI 36,272/7, NLI 30,308, and NLI 39,121/1. For the source of this line, see 312–13 n23.

44 WBY to Olivia Shakespear, November 23 [1928], L 748.

45 See Gallup C47 and A8.

46 See WBY to Oliver St John Gogarty, May 5 [1929], CL InteLex 5247.

47 The drafts of the first and second sections (see NLI 13,580, leaves 10–15), as in Packet, are dated February 4 and 9, 1929, respectively. In Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems, the first poem was titled “A Meditation written during Sickness at Algeciras.” See Poems 250–52. The copy of Packet sent to Macmillan as setting copy for A Vision suggests that WBY may not have initially intended to cut the poem: its first page includes numerous manuscript revisions, suggesting that WBY originally planned to make changes in the poem before deciding to cut it altogether.

48 Wade 163. The book’s colophon gives June 1929 as the month of completion.

49 G. W. Russell (Æ), “A Packet for Ezra Pound: AE Reviews W. B. Yeats’s Latest Book,” The Living Age 337:4347 (October 1, 1929), 187.

50 Seán Ó Faoláin, “Mr. Yeats’s Trivia,” Commonweal 10:30 (September 18, 1929), 513. Seán Ó Faoláin, “Mr. Yeats’s Kubla Khan,” The Nation (December 4, 1929), 681.

51 Manuscript Notebook for Stories of Michael Robartes and His Friends (1931) (NLI 13,577, leaves [1] and [29v]).

52 Wade 167.

53 See AVA lix–lx.

54 Stories 24.

55 WBY to Hansard Watt, December 14, 1930, CL InteLex 5419.

56 “Remaking,” 44–48.

57 WBY to Dorothy Wellesley, July 26, 1936, L 859.

58 C[harles] P[owell], “Mr W. B. Yeats,” Manchester Guardian, May 2, 1932, 5; and [Austin Clarke], TLS, March 24, 1932, 214.

59 The setting copy of AVA-Laurie is YL 2433c. Many of the changes in the setting copy of A Packet aim toward Macmillan house style, and more substantive changes have been noted in our annotations.

60 See Hood, “Remaking,” 55–57.

61 Correspondence concerning the proof process for A Vision appears in the letter books of Macmillan (BL Add. 54902–54904, 55003, and 55764–55800).

62 GY to A. P. Watt, February 11, 1936, CL InteLex 6520.

63 See Wade 191 and 192.

64 WBY to Ethel Mannin, October 9 [?1938], L 916.

65 Charles Williams, “Staring at Miracle,” Time and Tide (December 4, 1937), 1674.

66 G[eoffrey] E. G[rigson], “Thy Chase Had a Beast in View,” New Verse 29 (March 1938), 20; Michael Roberts, “The Source of Poetry,” The Spectator 159:5708 (November 19, 1937), Literary Supplement, 14; Kerker Quinn, “Through Frenzy to Truth,” The Yale Review 27:4 (Summer 1938), 834; Mary M. Colum, “Life and Literature: The Individual vs. Society,” Forum and Century 99:4 (April 1938), 214; Horace Reynolds, “W. B. Yeats Expounds His ‘Heavenly Geometry,’ ” The New York Times Book Review [43] (March 13, 1938), 2.

67 Michael Williams, “Doom,” The Commonweal 27:22 (March 25, 1938), 611; Reynolds, “W. B. Yeats Expounds,” 2; Seán Ó Faoláin, “Mr. Yeats’s Metaphysical Man,” The London Mercury 37:217 (November 1937), 70.

68 William Rose Benét, “Speculations of a Poet,” The Saturday Review 17:20 (March 12, 1938), 239; Stephen Spender, [Review], The Criterion 17:68 (April 1938), 536; M. L. Cazamian, [Review], Études Anglaises 2:3 (July–September 1938), 315. Cazamian’s original reads: “Le lecteur non initié tournera donc avec curiosité ces pages où le poète trace l’historique de ses rapports avec le monde des esprits, grâce à la capacité d’écriture automatique soudain révélée chez sa jeune femme d’abord.”

69 Edmund Wilson, “Yeats’s Vision,” The New Republic 94:1220 (April 20, 1938), 339; Roberts, “The Source of Poetry,” 14, 16.

70 Roberts, “The Source of Poetry,” 16; Wilson, “Yeats’s Vision,” 339; G[rigson], “Thy Chase Had a Beast in View,” 20.

71 Wilson, “Yeats’s Vision,” 339; Babette Deutsch, “Bones of a Poet’s Vision,” New York Herald Tribune Books 14:36 (May 8, 1938), 16; Eda Lou Walton, “Lend a Myth to God,” The Nation (July 9, 1938), 52; C. E. B., “Books of the Day,” The Illustrated London News 192:5153 (January 22, 1938), 126.

72 Quinn, “Through Frenzy to Truth,” 835; G[rigson], “Thy Chase Had a Beast in View,” 21–22.

73 Roberts, “The Source of Poetry,” 16; J. Bronowski, “Yeats’s Mysticism,” The Cambridge Review 59:1440 (November 19, 1937), 113; Stephen Spender, [Review], The Criterion 17:68 (April 1938), 537.

74 R. C. Bald, [Review], Philosophical Review 48:284 (March 1939), 239; Bronowski, “Yeats’s Mysticism,” 113; [Unsigned brief review], The New Statesman and Nation 15:361 (January 22, 1938), 140.

75 Benét, “Speculations of a Poet,” 239; Spender, [Review], 537; H. T. Hunt Grubb, “A Poet’s Dream,” Poetry Review 29:2 (March–April 1938): 123-41; Ó Faoláin, “Mr. Yeats’s Metaphysical Man,” 70.

76 Watt to Macmillan, April 17, 1939 (Add. MS. 54904. Vol. CXIX, f. 171). In 1935, plans began for a separate deluxe edition from Charles Scribner, dubbed the “Dublin” Edition, and for which WBY wrote introductions to his poetry and plays. See Edward Callan (ed.), Yeats on Yeats: The Last Introductions and the “Dublin” Edition (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1981).

77 See Warwick Gould, “The Definitive Edition: a History of the Final Arrangements of Yeats’s Work,” in A. Norman Jeffares’ edition of Yeats’s Poems (London: Palgrave, 1996), 706–49. Gould notes that the original Edition de Luxe, as contracted in 1916 and planned beginning in 1930, had only seven volumes (708).

78 Thomas Mark to GY, TLS carbon, June 26, 1939 (BL Add. 55826, f. 50). The bulk of BL Add. 55893 is the first-pull proof; the exception is signature P (pages 209–24 of the proofs, roughly 145–57 of the present edition), which is stamped “Second Proof” and dated “1 Sept 1939.” Unmarked bound copies of the complete set of first-pull proofs are also housed in the British Library (shelfmarks Vx29/189, RF.2008a.43–45), and differences between the first and second pulls of signature P have been noted in Table 3: these differences point to changes marked on the first pull of signature P, now lost.

79 Harold Macmillan [MHM/JGB] to Mrs. Yeats, October 17, 1939 (BL Add. 55830, f. 281).

80 T. Mark [TM/JVL] to Mrs. Yeats, October 19, 1939, BL Add. 55830, f. 334. On the relationships between Poems (1949) and the Coole Edition, see Gould, “The Definitive Edition.”

81 Hood, “Search,” 151. As Hood notes, this copy is now in the Russell K. Alspach Collection at the University of Massachusetts Library at Amherst. The corrections marked in this copy are enumerated on 151–54. Among the materials given to us by the Hoods is a copy of these markings, together with a photocopy of Alspach’s own listing of his collection, which includes this note for this copy: “A Vision (N.Y.) George Yeats’s signed copy, corrected by her for Macmillan of New York for the edition of 1956 (211M). The Title-page is torn out.” A letter written to Connie K. Hood from John D. Kendall (of the University Library) on November 19, 1981, notes the presence in Alspach’s list of three other items inscribed by GY (A Speech and Two Poems [1937], Mosada [1943], and Collected Poems [1950]), “which latter fact would seem to lend credence (if it were needed) to Alspach’s statement that the New York 1938 Vision was indeed annotated by whom and for what purpose he says.”

82 Wade 211M.

83 Richard J. Finneran suggests that the proofs for the first 58 pages were sent to GY in August 1960, when GY and Thomas Mark were considering incorporating these sections into Explorations (“On Editing Yeats: The Text of A Vision [1937],” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 19 [1977], 123–24). See also BL Add. 55896.

84 Hood, “Search,” 155.

85 Hood, “Search,” 164.

86 Hood, “Search,” 170; see also Warwick Gould, “The Definitive Edition,” 708–9.

A Packet for Ezra Pound

1 It took many years for WBY to use the etched portrait made in 1907 at Coole Park by the painter Augustus John (1878–1961), of which WBY wrote John Quinn at the time that John, “who has made a very fine thing of me has made me sheer tinker, drunken, unpleasant and disreputable, but full of wisdom, a melancholy English Bohemian, capable of everything, except of living joyously on the surface” (CL InteLex 751). WBY sat for John again in the summer of 1930, while working on A Vision. Remembering the first portrait at that time, WBY noted in his diary that he “shuddered” at first seeing it: “Always particular about my clothes, never dissipated, never unshaven except during illness, I saw myself there an unshaven, drunken bar-tender, and then I began to feel John had found something that he liked in me, something closer than character, and by that very transformation made it visible. He had found Anglo-Irish solitude, a solitude I have made for myself, an outlawed solitude” (Diary 1930 308).

In September 1934, WBY suggested to Harold Macmillan that the 1930 image be used for A Vision: “when you come to print the next book I shall send you my philosophical book A Vision (it is ready) you use as a frontispiece Augustus John’s portrait painted four or five years ago. It is in the Glasgow gallery” (CL InteLex 6096). The plan for “Etching by Augustus John to be used as frontispiece” was in place by March 1935 (CL InteLex 6193; see also 6199, 6299). The decision to use the portrait from 1907 (Manchester) rather than 1930 (Glasgow) may have involved permission: in October 1935, GY wrote R. A. Scott James, the editor of the London Mercury, that he could not use the 1930 image for this reason. Of the two portraits, GY wrote, “One has already been reproduced in the Macmillan COLLECTED POEMS, the other is in the City Art Gallery at Manchester. As regards the second of these two portraits, Dr Oliver Edwards, who is writing a life of WBY has been writing to John at intervals for five months or so asking for permission to reproduce the portrait. So far he has had no reply. The Curator of the Manchester Gallery says that John’s permission is essential! So I am afraid there is nothing doing” [CL InteLex 6395]. See also D. J. Gordon and Ian Fletcher, “The Image of the Poet,” in W. B. Yeats: Images of a Poet: My permanent or impermanent images (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1961; rpt. 1970), 17–18, 22–24.

2 A Packet for Ezra Pound was first published by Cuala Press in 1929; see Editors’ Introduction, xxxii–xxxvi.

3 The Yeatses came to this small Italian city on the Ligurian coast in the Genova province of Italy in February 1928. Although the town was not as glamorous as the French Riviera, it was not expensive to live there (see FPS 100) and therefore had a sizable if variable population of expatriates. While there, Pound connected Yeats with prominent members of contemporary artistic circles, including Basil Bunting, George Antheil, Gerhart Hauptmann, and Max Beerbohm. In a letter to the Japanese scholar Shotaro Oshima of March 24, 1929, WBY writes, “My wife and I have got a little flat here looking out over the sea and over mountains often wreathed in mist which continually remind me of the landscape painting of your country, even mist” (CL InteLex 5228).

4 The reference is to the fourth stanza of the ode (1819) by the Romantic poet John Keats (1795–1821):

What little town by river or sea shore,

   Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,

     Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?

And, little town, thy streets for evermore

   Will silent be: and not a soul to tell

     Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.

(lines 35–40, The Poems of John Keats, ed. Sidney Colvin [2 vols.; London: Chatto & Windus, 1920; YL1055], 2.87)

5 The German dramatist is playwright and Nobel Prize winner Gerhard Hauptmann (1862–1946). As WBY wrote to Olivia Shakespear, March 2 [1929], “To-night we dine with Ezra—the first dinner-coated meal since I got here—to meet Hauptmann who does not know a word of English but is fine to look at—after the fashion of William Morris” (L 758). The next day, Pound wrote to his mother: “Ceremony of introducing Yeatsz and Hauptmanns passed off calmly last evening with sacrifice of two pheasants. No other bloodshed” (Pound to his Parents 682). The barber’s brother, the retired skipper, and the specific tourists are unidentified. For the Italian prince: on February 25, 1928, WBY wrote to GY: “Tonight 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. They have a villa out on a headland. Mrs. Stein is of course an American, the widow, I gather, of several millionaires” (CL InteLex 5083).

6 American poet Ezra Pound (1885–1972) moved to Rapallo in 1924, and by this time he had taken up residence at via Marsala 20, where the balcony of his top-floor apartment had a view over the Lungotevere to the Golfo del Tigullio. This is not Pound’s first appearance in A Vision and its surrounding materials. In AVA, he appears as a subject of some of WBY’s reflections on his contemporaries (AVA 174–75), and Pound was cut as an example for Phase 12 only in galleys. In January and February 1925, the Yeatses traveled in southern Italy with Ezra and Dorothy Pound, and it was during that trip that WBY finished writing many sections of AVA.

WBY offered a complicated assessment of Pound’s character in his introduction to OBMV; see especially LE 193. On WBY’s comments about Pound in drafts for Packet, see Paul.

7 By the time this material was compiled into AVB, Pound had published A Draft of XXX Cantos (1930) and Eleven New Cantos, XXXI–XLI (1934)—forty-one poems (see Gallup A31, A37). Pound also published these poems in periodicals, individually or in small groups; for instance, “Cantos XLII–XLIV” appeared in The Criterion in April 1937 (Gallup C1401). The Fifth Decad of Cantos (including Cantos 42–51) would be published in June 1937. “There are now forty-nine” suggests conversations with Pound about poems written and/or forthcoming.

8 In Packet, this sentence reads: “I have often found there some scene of distinguished beauty but have never discovered why all the suits could not be dealt out in some quite different order” (2).

9 A fugue is a musical composition written for two or more voices in which a theme is introduced in one voice and then recurs directly and in imitation in the other voice(s). Baroque composer Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) wrote many fugues. On February 25, 1928, WBY wrote to GY concerning Pound’s Cantos, which in its latest printed form includes 116 numbered cantos as well as additional fragments, “Ezra has spent several hours explaining the structure of his cantos, & all I know is that there is a structure & that it is founded on that of a Fugue—that word looks wrong” (CL InteLex 5083). Carroll F. Terrell notes, “Pound is on record as saying that Yeats’s explanation did more harm than good because he had as little idea of a fugue as he had of a frog” (A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound [Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1980], viii). Nevertheless, in a letter to his father of April 11, 1927, Pound describes the overarching scheme of The Cantos as “[r]ather like, or unlike subject and response and counter subject in fugue” (The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige [New York: New Directions, 1971], 210). WBY similarly describes The Cantos in his introduction to OBMV (LE 192–93).

10 The dates for the legendary Greek poet Homer, to whom the epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey are ascribed, are not known. Herodotus dates him at about 850 BCE while other accounts position him as early as the tenth or eleventh centuries BCE; the best guesses seem to suggest between 750 and 650 BCE. Pound famously described epic as “a poem including history” (ABC of Reading [1934], [New York: New Directions, 1987], 46), and his Cantos are no exception. The Cantos opens with a translation of a passage from Homer’s Odyssey 11, known as the Nekuia, or ritual calling-up of ghosts from the Underworld (Cantos 1:3–5). The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidius Naso (43 BCE–17 CE) comprise fifteen books of more than 250 myths focused on changes of shape. Stories from the Metamorphoses permeate the Cantos, beginning in Canto 2 with references to books 3 and 10. Notable medieval characters include such troubadours and poets as Sordello (13th cent., known especially to Pound from Browning’s poem of the same name), Guido Cavalcanti (c. 1250–1300), and Arnaut Daniel (12th cent.), as well as numerous Italian princes, most prominently Sigismondo Malatesta (1498–1553) of Rimini. Modern characters range from personal friends to celebrities, prominent practitioners and theorists in the arts, and political leaders.

11 In Time and Western Man (1927), the English writer and painter Percy Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) condemns the art of his fellow modernist writers Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein for having allowed their supposedly “revolutionary” writing to become a vehicle for ideologies contrary to real human creativity and progress. In the ninth chapter, called “Ezra Pound, Etc.,” Lewis writes, “I could not reconcile the creative principles I have been developing with this sensationalist half-impresario, half-poet [Pound]; whose mind can be best arrived at, perhaps, by thinking of what would happen if you could mix in exactly equal proportions Bergson-Marinetti-Mr. Hueffer (with a few pre-Raphaelite ‘christian names’ thrown in), Edward Fitzgerald and Buffalo Bill” ([London: Chatto and Windus, 1927; Boston: Beacon Press, 1957], 38). For more of WBY’s reaction to Lewis’s book, see n17 below. WBY’s note closes with a quatrain from “The Progress of Beauty” (1719) by Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), which contrasts an aging woman’s appearance upon waking with the magic rendered by four hours of applying makeup.

12 Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu (or “The Unknown Masterpiece,” 1831) by Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) tells the story of a series of encounters between the young and as yet unknown French painter Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665), the mature Flemish painter Porbus (not Porteous) (1569–1622), and the aging (fictional) artist Master Frenhofer. See YL 109. See Warwick Gould, “The Unknown Masterpiece: Yeats and the Design of the Cantos,” in Pound in Multiple Perspective: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Andrew Gibson (London: Macmillan, 1993), 40–92.

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) was a French post-impressionist painter regarded as a principal predecessor of Cubism. There is no historical basis for the suggestion that Cézanne draws specifically on Porbus’ thinking, although Émile Bernard does seem to identify him with Balzac’s visionary painter (Souvenirs sur Paul Cézanne [Paris: Société des Trente, 1925], 34–36).

Ulysses (1922) by James Joyce (1882–1941) takes place on a single day and entirely in the city of Dublin. WBY wrote to John Quinn on July 23, 1918, that Ulysses in serial form “looks like becoming the best work he has yet done. It is an entirely new thing—neither what the eye sees nor the ear hears, but what the rambling mind thinks and imagines from moment to moment. He has certainly surpassed in intensity any novelist of our time . . .” (L 651; see also L 679). On July 27, 1922, WBY wrote to Pound,

I have read a great part of “Ulysses” and then gave myself a course of Trollope for a change and then just as I wanted to take up Ulysses again which I admire immensely, found my eyes out of sorts; this does not mean that I do not see the immense importance of the book, and it has been Trollope not it that destroyed my eyes. I read a few pages of Ulysses at a time as if he were a poem. Some passages have great beauty, lyric beauty, even in the fashion of my generation, and the whole book incites to philosophy.

(CL InteLex 4152)

Writing to Olivia Shakespear in late June of 1923, WBY spoke of inviting Joyce to visit, but confessed that “[i]f he comes I shall have to use the utmost ingenuity to hide the fact that I have never finished Ulysses” (L 698). In AVA, in a passage not retained in AVB, WBY similarly joins Pound and Joyce in the description of the historical Phase 23, which he associated with many experimental writers of his time (174–75). See also VPl 569.

13 Cosimo (or Cosmè) Tura (1433–95), who worked regularly for the d’Este family, is considered a founder of the Ferrara school of art. Among the eighteen sections of the fresco decoration of the Salone dei Mesi (or Hall of the Months) in the Palazzo di Schifanoia, a former d’Este palace, six contain jousting scenes and cityscapes and twelve are devoted to the months of the year. The sections each have three horizontal bands. The top band of each panel illustrates the triumphal procession of the pagan god or goddess of the month. The middle band contains the zodiacal sign of each month surrounded by the three astrological “faces” or phases of the decans (36 divisions of the zodiac, dividing each sign in three and so called because they comprise 10° each). The bottom zone depicts scenes of daily life at the court of Borso d’Este. What WBY identifies as “The Triumph of Love” is April, whose upper zone contains a triumph of Venus. “The Triumph of Chastity” may be May, whose upper zone holds a Triumph of Apollo. Although art historians do not believe Cosimo Tura responsible for this hall and suggest Francesco del Cossa as more likely to have produced these frescos, Tura is one candidate for the creation of some of them. See Cantos 79:505 and Terrell, A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound, viii.

14 “Hodos Chameliontos,” a phrase meaning “the Path of the Chameleon,” appears prominently in and as a title of a section of the autobiographical work The Trembling of the Veil to suggest the experience of being lost amid multivarious esoteric ideas and experiences. “But now image called up image in an endless procession, and I could not always choose among them with any confidence,” WBY writes, describing himself as “lost in that region a cabbalistic manuscript, shown to me by MacGregor Mathers, had warned me of; astray upon the Path of the Chameleon, upon Hodos Chameliontos” (Au 215). Hodos Chamelionis is the title by which the Introducing Adept in the Adeptus Minor (5 = 6) Ritual of the Golden Dawn is known, and also the name given to the newly installed Aspirant to the rank. At the climax of the ceremony, the Chief greets the new Adeptus Minor with the words, “And therefore do I greet thee with the Mystic Title of ‘Hodos Chamelionis,’ the Path of the Chamelion, the Path of Mixed Colours . . .” (Israel Regardie, The Golden Dawn. A Complete Course in Practical Ceremonial Magic. Four Volumes in One. The Original Account of the Teachings, Rites and Ceremonies of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn [Stella Matutina], 6th ed. [Saint Paul, Minn.: Llewellyn Publications, 1992], 225, 242). The spelling is not standard; family friend and Trinity College don Louis C. Purser informed WBY that “the genitive is chameleontos” if used as a Greek word (LWBY 436), and WBY changed the spelling. Concerning the use of the manual in the Golden Dawn, see George Mills Harper, Yeats’s Golden Dawn (London: Macmillan, 1974), 177. Elsewhere in A Vision, WBY uses the same phrase to explain the confusion facing those of his generation: “Our generation has witnessed a first weariness, has stood at the climax, at what in The Trembling of the Veil I call Hodos Chameliontos, and when the climax passes will recognize that there common secular thought began to break and disperse” (217; cf. AVA 173). See also “The Dedication to Vestigia” (AVA liv).

In Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu (see n12), Frenhofer finds excellence of detail in the woman’s shoulder and bosom but deems her throat (not foot, as WBY misremembers) “all false.” In Packet, the current paragraph is followed by another, struck through on the setting copy:

It is almost impossible to understand the art of a generation younger than one’s own. I was wrong about “Ulysses” when I had read but some first fragments, and I do not want to be wrong again—above all in judging verse. Perhaps when the sudden Italian spring has come I may have discovered what will seem all the more, because the opposite of all I have attempted, unique and unforgettable. (4)

15 The street mentioned is now Via Gramsci, and the first of the hotels is Hotel Riviera on the current Piazza IV Novembre (Massimo Bacigalupo, “Tigullio Itineraries,” Quaderni di Palazzo Serra 15 [2008]: 391).

In a letter to GY of February 27 [1928], WBY writes: “All well here—Ezra explains his cantos, & reads me Cavalcanti & we argue about it quite amicably. We have twice dined to get variety at another hotel—almost under our trees—where he purloins sraps [sic] that he may feed a black & two grey cats who wait for him about fifty yards from the hotel. He has been feeding them for quite a considerable time & brags of there [sic] fatness” (LWBY/GY 191). See also YVP 3:37.

16 In a letter to Olivia Shakespear of November 23, 1928, WBY credits T. S. Eliot with this observation (L 748).

17 This reference is to WBY’s close friend the Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne (MacBride) (1866–1953), with whom he was in love for many years. WBY frequently referred to Pound’s feeding of cats in letters to his friends in Ireland. On April 1, 1928, he wrote to Lady Gregory, comparing Pound and Gonne:

Have you read Wyndham Lewis? He attacked Ezra Pound and Joyce in Time and Western Man, and is on my side of things philosophically. My essay takes up the controversy and explains Ezra Pound sufficiently to keep him as a friendly neighbour, for I foresee that in the winter he must take Russell’s place of a Monday evening. He has most of Maud Gonne’s opinions (political and economic) about the world in general, being what Lewis calls “the revolutionary simpleton.” The chief difference is that he hates Palgrave’s Golden Treasury as she does the Free State Government, and thinks even worse of its editor than she does of President Cosgrave. He has even her passion for cats and large numbers wait him every night at a certain street corner knowing that his pocket is full of meat bones or chicken bones. They belong to the oppressed races. (L 739)

On Lewis’s treatment of Pound in Time and Western Man, see also n11 above.

18 WBY refers to several churches. The first regular Anglican chaplaincy in Rapallo was established in 1875, and the first services were held in the Church of St. George in 1904. The chapel at All Souls College, Oxford (or The Warden and the College of the Souls of all Faithful People deceased in the University of Oxford), was built 1438–42. The Yeatses had lodgings in Oxford from late 1917 to 1922. The National Cathedral and Collegiate Church of St. Patrick in Dublin was founded in 1191 and is the larger of Dublin’s two Church of Ireland cathedrals. Its building dates from 1220, and it was granted cathedral status in 1224. Jonathan Swift was Dean of the Cathedral and is buried there. The Basilica of Sant’Ambrogio in Milan was built by St. Ambrose in 379–386, and then rebuilt in the Romanesque style in the twelfth century.

19 René Descartes (1596–1650) is a foundational figure in modern philosophy and mathematics, famous for his seemingly skeptical questioning about the possibilites of knowledge. The Comune di Zoagli in Liguria is about five kilometers southeast of Rapallo, along the via Aurelia. The American violinist Olga Rudge, mother of Ezra Pound’s daughter Mary, had a house in Sant’Ambrogio di Zoagli during the time that the Yeatses lived in Rapallo. Gerhard Hauptmann’s villa was on the Zoagli Road. Nietzsche lived in Rapallo for a time, a fact that WBY knew, probably from Pound (see L 773). Packet included a sixth, concluding section of “Rapallo,” struck through on the setting copy of Packet and so excluded in the 1937 text of A Vision: see Appendix II, 275–76.

20 The Anglo-Irish satirist, poet, and essayist Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) was Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin; in the 1920s and 1930s especially, as WBY writes in the introduction to The Words upon the Window-Pane, “Swift haunts me; he is always just round the next corner” (Plays 708). This quotation is the opening sentence of Swift’s “A Preface to the Bishop of Sarum’s Introduction to the Third Volume of the History of the Reformation of the Church of England by Gregory Misosarum,” a pamphlet written, in the words of Dr. Johnson, “to warn the nation of the approach of popery” (The Works of Jonathan Swift in Two Volumes [London: Henry G. Bohn, 1850], 1:379). See YL 2043.

21 Isabella Augusta Persse, Lady Gregory (1852–1932), Irish nationalist, dramatist, folklorist, and theater manager, was an important mentor to WBY and one of his closest friends. WBY and Lady Gregory collaborated extensively, and he stayed often at her house Coole Park, near Gort in Co. Galway. In A Vision, she is an example for Phase 24; see 125. The Tower and The Winding Stair were first published in 1928 and 1929 respectively, with a larger edition of the latter published in September 1933. Together they contain many of WBY’s best known poems, as well as a wealth of poetry influenced by the AS.

22 GY, born Bertha Georgie Hyde Lees (1892–1968), married WBY on October 20, 1917. See Saddlemyer for the authoritative account of the life of “a remarkably clever, creative, witty, energetic, and wily woman” (xx), and Margaret Mills Harper, Wisdom of Two: The Spiritual and Literary Collaboration of George and W. B. Yeats (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), for a study of the automatic writing as a collaboration between the Yeatses.

23 On the first draft of this passage, see Editors’ Introduction, xxxiii–xxxiv. As George Mills Harper notes, WBY’s first direct reference to the AS occurs in a letter to Lady Gregory of October 29:

The last two days Georgie and I have been very happy. . . . There has been something very like a miraculous intervention. Two days ago I was in great gloom, (of which I hope, and believe, George knew nothing). I was saying to myself “I have betrayed three people;” then I thought “I have lived all through this before.” Then George spoke of the sensation of having lived through something before (she knew nothing of my thought). Then she said she felt that something was to be written through her. She got a piece of paper, and talking to me all the while so that her thoughts would not affect what she wrote, wrote these words (which she did not understand) “with the bird” (Iseult) “all is well at heart. Your action was right for both but in London you mistook its meaning.” (L 633)

The dates in this letter seem to question WBY’s assertion that the AS began on October 24, and the exact date is unclear (see YVP 3:349, MYV 1:3–5, Saddlemyer 105). As Margaret Mills Harper notes, although no such statement occurs in the extant AS, ten sheets of MS filed with drafts of this introduction contain very early script with this response to an unrecorded question: “I give you philosophy to give you new images you ought not to use it as philosophy and it is not only given for you—” (Harper, Wisdom of Two, 6, citing NLI 36,260/4).

24 Written in early 1917 and published by Macmillan in January 1918, PASL (translated by WBY in a letter to Lady Gregory as “through the friendly silences of the moon”) lays out concepts important to A Vision, including Daimons, the antithetical or anti-self, and Anima Mundi as a source of common images (LE 1–33). WBY makes the distinction in PASL that “We make of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry” (LE 8). Noting differences between “the winding movement of nature and the straight line,” he writes:

I do not doubt those heaving circles, those winding arcs, whether in one man’s life or in that of an age, are mathematical, and that some in the world, or beyond the world, have foreknown the event and pricked upon the calendar the life-span of a Christ, a Buddha, a Napoleon: that every movement, in feeling or in thought, prepares in the dark by its own increasing clarity and confidence its own executioner. (LE 14)

The French general and emperor Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) is an example for Phase 20, and he appears in the description of Phase 21 (see 112–17). In the AS, Christ is placed at Phase 22.

25 The dramatic poem Paracelsus (1835) by Robert Browning (1812–89) accounts Paracelsus’ attempts to attain complete knowledge of human nature and fate through intellectual discipline, but he gains this knowledge only through the acceptance of love, embodied in the “Byzantine teacher” Aprile. Browning’s Paracelsus bears slight resemblance to the historical Paracelsus (1493–1541), a Swiss physician and alchemist. On August 22, 1923, WBY wrote that GY was guided by a spirit voice to pull Browning from the shelf and turn to a passage from “Paracelsus” (YVP 3:185). See also YL 297, 298. The bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), traces its eponymous hero’s apprenticeships in bourgeois business and the theater (1796; trans. Thomas Carlyle, 2 vols., 1895; Edward O’Shea, “The 1920s Catalogue of W. B. Yeats’s Library,” YA 4 [1986], ed. Warwick Gould, 283). At the close of the novel, Wilhelm is presented with an account of his apprenticeship, signaling his initiation.

26 WBY and GY honeymooned at the Ashdown Forest Hotel, in East Sussex, England. They were in England—in Oxford, London, and Sussex (to which they returned to escape zeppelin raids)—before arriving in Ireland on March 9, 1918. In Ireland, they spent time in Dublin, the ancient monastic center Glendalough, and the neighboring valley Glenmalure, the latter two in Co. Wicklow. They also spent time in Galway, Coole, and Ballinamantane House on the Coole estate, as well as making brief visits elsewhere in the west. They moved into the cottage next to the castle at Ballylee, near Coole, on September 12, 1918 (see John Kelly, A W. B. Yeats Chronology [Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003], 195–200). They did not travel to Rosses Point, the seaside village north of Sligo that meant much to WBY and his family.

27 The Yeatses arrived in New York on January 22, 1920, for a four-month tour including stops in Toronto; Utah; Waco, Texas; Chicago; Pasadena, California; Portland, Oregon; and then a lengthy stay in New York.

28 In the AS of March 29, 1920, Dionertes communicates, “I do not really want script here—I prefer to use other methods—sleeps” (YVP 2:539). In an entry in a notebook of “sleeps,” dated “28(?) March 1920,” and made in Pasadena, WBY notes a “New Method”: “George speaks while asleap.” He continues: “Sees herself dead. Sees many sleapers as if floating in air. All in dark except for a little light round flowers left by living. They by help of this light smell the flowers. They only hear & see, when living think of them, as dead. They are dreaming. She insists that these sleapers are not yet spirits” (YVP 3:9). On May 28 (from Montréal), GY writes (and Dionertes interrupts):

There was to be a new method. We were to read over sleep accounts & Dionertes would then develop the subject day by day (no no no I said I would write in once the entire subjective after life state

Yes

Script)

We were told that he would describe without questions the after death state of subjective man. We were then to go on to subjective. But first there was to be one more sleep to get meaning of colours. (YVP 3:21)

For a summary of sleeps and of the Sleep and Dream Notebooks, see YVP 3:1–7.

The record of the sleep of September 29, 1920, recounts: “While he [Dionertes] was talking he was interrupted by George making a lapping sound. He said ‘She dreams herself a Cat, & that she is lapping up something from the floor’. I said ‘what is to be done’ He said ‘Pretend you are a dog’ I could think of nothing better than to say ‘Bow Wow’ as one does to a child. To my surprise the Interpreter sprang away from me in great terror & lay panting for a long time after. I had spoken in an ordinary voice but Dionertes said I had been merely too loud. I woke George soon after, & she had a series of nightmares the whole night after in connectin [sic] with a large wolf” (YVP 3:49–50). See also YVP 3:51, 55–56, 76, 92. Such dreams also feature in the Robartes-Aherne fiction in AVA 202.

29 YVP substantiates this chronology. The twenty-eight embodiments appear in the AS on the evening of November 23, 1917, in a diagram composed of a circle of numbers from 1 to 28, and a listing of a first draft of the characteristics of the Will for the Table of the Four Faculties (YVP 1:115–16; see 71–73). This list speaks to the significance of GY’s collaboration. Although a number of the terms were changed, the meaning of the descriptive characteristics remained consistent through AVA and AVB. After about three weeks, the Yeatses had established the basis of their theory of human personality and history, though the twenty-eight phases—their characteristics and who might be associated with each—continued to be a preoccupation for months to come. See especially YVP 1:115–16, and MYV 1:53–54. On the soul’s judgment after death, see YVP 1:148–52. The “first symbolical map” refers to the diagram in the AS of June 5 (YVP 1:477), an early incarnation of the historical cones. See also YVP 3:60–61, 172; AVA 147; and 193.

The first volume of Der Untergang des Abendlandes by Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) was published in 1918, with a revision in 1922; the second volume appeared that same year. WBY’s copies of both volumes of The Decline of the West, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (London: George Allen & Unwin, [1926–29]; YL 1975 and 1975a), are heavily marked. In a letter of July 2, 1926, WBY wrote to Olivia Shakespear:

By the way do get Spengler’s Decline of the West and compare his general scheme with mine in “Dove or Swan.” While his first volume was going through the press in 1918 I was getting the outline—and I think all the main diagrams of mine. There is exact correspondence in date after date. He was not translated till after my book was published. Had he been I could not have written. (L 716)

30 The famous dialogues of the Athenian philosopher Plato (427–c. 347 BCE), foundational texts for Western philosophy, typically feature conversations between Socrates and a student or others. In Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy (1865), the English philosopher and political economist John Stuart Mill (1806–73) attacked “intuitionist” philosophy in favor of rational principles. Mystics, from many religious traditions including Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam, emphasize direct experience of the divine; the term also applies to initiates of esoteric religious practices.

The prophetic books of the English poet, printmaker, and artist William Blake (1757–1827), for which Blake supplied both mythopoeia and engravings, include Tiriel (c. 1789), The Book of Thel (c. 1789), America: A Prophecy (1793), Europe: A Prophecy (1793), The Book of Urizen (1794), The Book of Ahania (1795), The Book of Los (1795), Milton: A Poem (1804–10), and Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion (1804–20). WBY owned facsimile editions of a number of these, including The Book of Ahania (YL 199), Milton (YL 206, 215), and Jerusalem (YL 214, 220a).

The Yeatses owned many books by Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), the Swedish scientist, mystic, philosopher, and theologian; see YL 2036–40 and Edward O’Shea, “The 1920s Catalogue of W. B. Yeats’s Library,” YA 4 (1986), ed. Warwick Gould, 289. See also WBY’s essay “Swedenborg, Mediums, and the Desolate Places” (written 1914, pub. 1920; LE 47–73). The Yeatses also owned numerous volumes by the German Christian mystic and theologian Jacob Boehme (1575–1624); see YL 234–39, O’Shea, “The 1920s Catalogue of W. B. Yeats’s Library,” 281. The “Hermetic Students” of the Golden Dawn were a group of occultists founded in London around 1888. WBY’s printed invitation to join the group is dated March 7, 1890 (George Mills Harper, “From Zelator to Theoricus: Yeats’s ‘Link with the Invisible Degrees,’ ” Yeats Studies 1 [1971], 80, n4).

Cabbala, or Kabbalah, is a Jewish theosophical system of mystical teachings aimed at explaining the relationships between an eternal creator and a finite universe. The term “Cabbala” (variantly spelled, sometimes beginning with “Q”) is also used in Christian and hermetic traditions, including the underlying system of such magical societies as the Golden Dawn. See, for instance, The Kabbalah Unveiled (1887; YL1292a), translated and edited by S. L. MacGregor Mathers.

31 Frustrators, a group of spirits who seek to thwart the inquiry of the AS or sleeps, make many appearances in the records of the Yeatses’ sessions. Leo, linked later to Leo Africanus, is the most ill-willed, and his presence is noted in the first preserved AS: Thomas of Dorlowicz (the Control) notes, “Better not act by Leo ever but may give good information,” and he adds “Malignant sometimes—not to be trusted in—never believe his prophecy” (YVP 1:56). See also YVP 2:137–39, 3:99–101; MYV 2:180–85; and AVA 196.

32 In a notebook entry headed “Oxford—Sleep of August 30. night—11 pm,” GY records: “After Dionertes had been speaking for some time there was a bird’s cry which he said was an Owl, & he made me keep silent that he might listen but it did not come again. A little later the clocks began to strike 12; and he asked what sound that was. I told him & he again asked me to keep silent. When the last strike was finished he said ‘Sounds like that are sometimes a great pleasure to us’ ” (YVP 3:41).

33 On January 15 [1922], WBY notes, “After long interruption from influenza there have been many short sleeps which I am not yet to write out.” On May 2, GY notes, “I found out that when we were told not to write out the results of Sleeps it was frustration. Many sleeps have been wasted for we are not now trusted to write them out without going over it again” (YVP 3:104).

34 Sensory phenomena of various kinds—smells pleasant and foul, knocks, voices, other sounds, etc.—are a common component of séances and other mediumistic practices. For instance, WBY’s early encounters with Leo Africanus involve voices (presumed not to be that of the medium), “Lights,” “Touches,” and “Sounds apart from voices” (see “The Manuscript of ‘Leo Africanus,’ ” ed. Steve L. Adams and George Mills Harper, YA 1 [1982]: 3–47).

35 Hone identifies this village as Shillingford, on the Oxfordshire/Berkshire border (W. B. Yeats, 1865–1939, 2nd ed. [London: Macmillan, 1962], 336). The Yeatses rented a cottage in Shillingford from April to June 1921, after which they moved to Thame, also in Oxfordshire, where they stayed until September. Michael Butler Yeats was born in Thame on August 22.

36 As an instance of flashes of light and table blows, WBY writes on September 12 [1921], “Before W. M. [William Michael—later changed to Michael Butler] was born Dionertes once drew Georges attention on something I said, which might have started some morbid suggestion, by two loud blows on the table as it seemed, & once by a flash of light which she saw” (YVP 3:95). On whistling, see, for example, the entry for sleeps of September 26–28, 1920 (YVP 3:48), and that of December 4 [1920] (YVP 3:58).

37 In Note 44 (w. 1914) to Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland by Lady Gregory (1920), WBY writes: “The sudden filling of the air by a sweet odour is a common event of the séance room” (LE 288). Descriptions of smells are common in the notebooks of sleeps: see YVP 3:35, 51–52, 99, 104–5, 107. The Yeatses devoted some inquiry to determining the significance of these fragrances; see YVP 3:96–97. For an instance of the smell of roses, see YVP 3:95–96; see also WBY’s note to 167; see also Appendix II, 283; and FPS 119–20. For the smell of Glastonbury thorn, see YVP 3:84–85. The ancient English town of Glastonbury in Somerset has been linked through legend to the hiding place of the Holy Grail and the tomb of Arthur and Guinevere. The Glastonbury thorn blooms at Christmas; according to legend, when Joseph of Arimathea arrived in Glastonbury, he thrust his staff into the ground, which then flowered into the Glastonbury thorn. Michael Butler Yeats was born August 22, 1921.

38 Sutherland suggests that this poem is likely “Moving House” by T’ao Ch’ien (365–427) (Sutherland 621). Arthur Waley’s translation of the poem appears in A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (London: Constable, 1920; YL 2216).

39 “Knots” are discussed at length in the AS from November 22, 1917. The Control Thomas defines a “complex” as “any knot of hidden thought lying in the subconscious that originates in some passion or violent emotion.” He distinguishes knots from sequences, noting that knots “should be untied” and that they “are the root of inaction & inarticulateness and incapacity for expression” (YVP 1:105). WBY develops this idea more fully in Book III, 164. See also LE 25–29 and AVA 193.

40 Guido Cavalcanti was an Italian poet associated with Dante. See also xxxiii and nn10 and 15 above.

41 Michael Butler Yeats (1921–2007), Irish politician and diplomat, was the son of WBY and GY.

42 On November 18, 1920, WBY writes in a notebook, “There has been much minor phenomena. In the boat’s cabin coming from Ireland for instance there was a very strong antiseptic smell & in a short ‘sleap’ we were told that I would be much better next day which I was. There have been sweet fragrances from time [to time] & once after our return here a smell of burnt feathers. This was to warn me that Anne—‘feathers’—would have a night mare unless we prevented it. George too—we were told I think in script—would have one” (YVP 3:53–54).

43 In an entry in a sleep notebook dated “March 28(?) 1920,” WBY writes: “The day the Japanese gave me the old Japanese sword, the Japanese dined with us & after dinner I spoke to him of certain [of] our philosophic ideas which are the reverse of all Tolstoy—who had influenced him—commends. After he went away & while George was getting out script book of script of March 21, a voice said in clear loud tones ‘quite right that is what I wanted’. The script repeated this & said what I heard was by ‘direct voice’ ” (YVP 3:9). See also YVP 2:534. WBY received this ceremonial sword from Junzo Sato on March 20, 1920.

While better known for his fiction, Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828–1910) wrote such works of political and religious philosophy as A Confession (1882), The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894), “On Anarchy” (1900), and A Letter to a Hindoo (1908).

44 On November 25 [1920], WBY writes in a notebook of sleeps, “Walking back from Bridges yesterday by the light of the moon George saw a very large bird in the sky. She said ‘I first thought it was an aeroplane’. Dorothy Pound and I saw nothing” (YVP 3:56). In a postscript to his entry of January 11 [1921], WBY writes, “PS. George saw the Black Eagle again a couple of weeks ago. Shortly after wards she found that there has been conception. Black Eagle = fourth Daimon” (YVP 3:65). WBY dictated an entry to GY on September 5 [1921], saying, “N.B. Asked about apparitions seen by Interpreter during William Michael’s illness 2 days after birth. 6 formed. a man & woman of early 16th century; 2 scholars in costume of middle of 17th & 2 undefined figures” (YVP 3:97).

45 The Yeatses preserved thirty-six notebooks or bundles of AS and four substantial notebooks recording sleeps, along with other loose sheets and partial collections of both methods. See YVP 1:11 and 3:1. The Card File, consisting of 782 three-by-five-inch cards, represents a late stage in the Yeatses’ synthesis of the AS, sleeps, and other materials, assembled toward the drafting of A Vision. See YVP 3:222–430.

46 In Packet, the date is given as 1925 (24); WBY might have been thinking of Oswald Spengler’s essay “The Downfall of Western Civilization,” translated from German by Kenneth Burke, appearing in installments in the November 1924 (361–78), December 1924 (482–504), and January 1925 (9–26) issues of The Dial. On May 13, 1925, WBY wrote to Edmund Dulac, “A German called Oswald Spengler has lit on a number of the same ideas as those in my book. The American Dial has just published a long essay by him—the introduction to his book now being translated which might have been a chapter of ‘A Vision’. He applies the fundamental thought to things outside my knowledge, but his thought & mine differ in nothing. It seems that the thought came to him suddenly & with great excitement” (CL InteLex 4728). On July 30, 1926, WBY wrote to William Force Stead that Spengler’s book “has filled me with astonishment. [. . .] there are exact thoughts and dates that I recorded in Galway in 1918 when it was passing through the press in Germany. [. . .] I have reached it all from a different point of view but the result is the same. Coincidence is impossible” (CL InteLex 4904).

47 Spengler writes that “The Classical sculptor had fashioned the eyes as blind, but now the pupils are bored, the eye, unnaturally enlarged, looks into the space that in Attic art it had not acknowledged as existing” (1:329; see also 1:216 and 1:264). Compare with 200 and AVA 156. Concerning portrait heads on stock bodies, Spengler claims, “All the Roman portrait statues, male and female, go back for posture and mien to a very few Hellenic types; those copied more or less true to style, served for torsos, while the heads were executed as ‘likenesses’ by simple craftsmen who possessed the knack” (1:295). Compare with 201 and AVA 156–57. Spengler describes “the portraits of the Constantinian age, with their fixed stare into the infinite” (1:306; see also 1:329). Compare with 200, 204 and AVA 157, 159.

48 Taken from “To Ireland in the Coming Times” (Poems 46–47), which first appeared in The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (London, 1892; Boston and London, 1892); these lines were among several that were revised considerably over time.

49 On the setting copy of Packet, WBY had added direction to include a note specifying “The first edition published by Werner Laurie in 1925,” but this note was not incorporated. While these sections received significantly less revision than other sections after their publication in AVA-Laurie, they are not reproduced “without change.” Most notably, WBY eliminated several pages from AVA about his contemporary moment and the near future from the end of the text of “Dove or Swan” before publishing AVB, leaving in their place a row of dots (see 218) and adding a new section called “The End of the Cycle” (219–20). See AVA 174–78 and AVA 340–52.

50 WBY refers to the framing fiction of AVA, lvii–12.

51 WBY refers here to his copy of The Works of George Berkeley (1784; YL 160). The Anglo-Irish philosopher Berkeley (1685–1753) was of great importance to WBY as he worked on AVB (see especially 52 and 140n); see also “Bishop Berkeley” (LE 103–112). The playwright and poet Lennox Robinson (1886–1958) was one of WBY’s collaborators at the Abbey Theatre and a close friend of both WBY and GY.

52 Saddlemyer notes that GY had studied Principles of Physiological Psychology by the German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920), “with his emphasis on introspection in investigating the immediate experiences of consciousness and his concept of the ‘folk soul’ ” (44, and see 672 n7). GY’s knowledge of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) dates from at least 1913 (Saddlemyer 39); WBY wrote to Olivia Shakespear in 1927 that he had taken up reading Hegel only to find the system there already: “I write verse & read Hegel & the more I read I am but the more convinced that those invisible persons knew all” (June 23, 1927, CL InteLex 5008; see YL 1589–94). WBY had known the translations of the English Neoplatonist Thomas Taylor (1758–1835) for many years. Taylor produced the first complete translations of Plato and Aristotle, as well as translations of the Orphic fragments, Neoplatonic philosophers such as Porphyry and Proclus, and other philosophers; see Thomas Taylor the Platonist: Selected Writings, ed. Kathleen Raine and George Mills Harper (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969). GY purchased her first copy of Thomas Taylor’s translation of Plotinus also in 1913 and bought another the following year (Saddlemyer 45; YL 1595, 1595A). On her study of Pico, whose eccentric defenses of Cabbalistic thought were very influential on Renaissance humanism, see Saddlemyer 60, 121, and MYV 1:41–42 and 273 n5; and see YL 1595, 1567.

53 On November 5, 1928, WBY wrote to Stephen MacKenna, “I have read all your translations from Plotinus, some of them several times and want more,” and asking for “translations from the Irish” for the Cuala Press.

54 WBY enjoyed crime fiction, westerns, and other light reading: see a letter to GY on February 25, 1928, mentioning a trip to the library for “more base fiction” (LWBY/GY 191).

55 The Greek Pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles (495–435 BCE) is known for his identification of four elements in nature (earth, air, fire, and water), and his belief that existence is shaped by a continual struggle between Love and Strife. In On Nature, when Strife reaches the depths of the central point (the vortex) around which the cosmos turns, Love appears in the middle of the whirl. Love unites what Strife had divided, thereby creating mortal beings.

56 This illness began in October 1927. To escape the Irish winter, WBY and GY traveled to Spain—to Gibraltar, Algeciras, and Seville—and then by late November, to Cannes. Concerning WBY’s illness and the Yeatses’ ensuing travel, see Foster 2:353–56.

57 Anne Butler Yeats (1919–2001), daughter of WBY and GY, was a painter and set designer.

58 Daimon is one of the more confusing Yeatsian terms, whose meaning changed over time. In both versions of A Vision, Daimon refers basically to two concepts: that of an anti-self, i.e., a being opposite to its human counterpart (as in the poem “Ego Dominus Tuus” [Poems 161–63]); and that of a greater self, akin to the spirit intermediary between the gods and men of Plato as explained by Proclus (The Six Books of Proclus, The Platonic Successor, on the Theology of Plato, trans. Thomas Taylor [2 vols.; London: A. J. Valpy, 1816], Chap. 43, 260–65). Not only individual people but “Nations, cultures, schools of thought may have their Daimons” (209).

The Daimon derives from classical and occult texts and traditions as well as the AS. Plato discusses daimons as wise spirits in Cratylus (397e), in terms of the soul in Phaedo, and with reference to inspiration for art in Ion (cf. UP 1:399). Other influential Platonic ideas include the spirit intermediaries in Symposium, a third term of divinity within humanity in Timaeus, and the myth of souls and their chosen genii in Republic 10. See also the fourth tractate of the third Ennead of Plotinus; Plutarch’s essay “On the Genius of Socrates” (LE 65–66, 269; YL 1598); Heraclitus’s fragment 121 and Empedocles’s Purifications v. 369 ff. (LE 11–12, 28–29; see also Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy 141, 233–34, 270); the work of various Neoplatonists (see LE 67–68); and such later figures as Cornelius Agrippa (LE 24), Blake (Blake 1), Henry More (LE 22), and Golden Dawn teachings. See also AVA 239 n62.

In AVA, first, the Daimon is opposite to her human counterpart (including in gender); see 24–25. Second, the Daimon is a sort of guardian spirit; see 182. The concept of the Ghostly Self is distinct from the Daimon; see 183. In AVB, however, as Neil Mann notes, WBY’s thinking had altered: by 1937, “he generally came to see the Ghostly Self in terms of the ‘discarnate Daimon’ ” (“The Thirteenth Cone,” Mann et al., 189). To some degree, the confusing quality of this concept derives from the fact that, even when composing AVB, WBY was attempting to describe a system he did not fully understand.

59 This sentence and the sentence preceding it do not appear in Packet.

60 Rather than “partly accepting and partly rejecting,” the text in Packet reads simply “rejecting”; WBY added this emendation in the setting copy. He repeats this reference to Swedenborg on 165. The quotation, attributed to Orpheus, the legendary Greek musician and poet, is taken from Three Books of Occult Philosophy (w. 1510; Book 3, Chap. 41, 479–80) by the German physician, theologian, and occultist Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486–1535). WBY also gives this quotation in “Swedenborg, Mediums, and Desolate Places” (LE 68), and uses it as the source of the title for Book IV of AVA (179). GY studied Agrippa seriously beginning in 1913; see YL 24; Saddlemyer 60 and 679 n11; NLI 40,568/2.

In Packet, this sentence includes further phrasing, struck through on the setting copy and so omitted: “. . . dreams’; that John Philoponus thinks that, if they show in recognisable form, that form is but as frozen water that keeps the shape after the jug is broken; and that they are much called in legend ‘The Shape-changers’ ” (30).

61 WBY added this note on the setting copy, dating it “1931.”

62 In Packet, the number given is “four” (31). As Connie K. Hood notes, much of the material that would become Book II originated in drafts of Book I, and WBY did not separate the books until after 1932 (“Remaking,” 48–50).

63 WBY misattributes the six-winged angels to Daniel rather than Isaiah (6:1–2), possibly conflating it with the vision in Daniel 7:1–12.

The Greek philosopher, mathematician, and mystic Pythagoras of Samos (6th cent. BCE) is known through the writings of others, including Plato, Aristotle, Proclus, and Porphyry. Pythagoras came to be credited with the Pythagorean theorem; an understanding of relationships of musical notes and mathematical equations; and the mystical symbol of the “tetractys,” a triangular figure of ten dots in four rows with one, two, three, and four dots in each row (symbolizing key mystical Pythagorean ideas, with the number ten showing unity of a higher order). Both Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism claim connections to the Pythagorean Brotherhood, the esoteric Order established by his followers. Cf. “The Statues” (Poems 344–45).

Chap. 11 of S. L. MacGregor Mathers’s translation of The Kabbalah Unveiled (Kabbala Denudata) (London: George Redway, 1887), entitled “Concerning the Beard of Macroprosopus in General,” describes the thirteen forms of “that most glorious supernal beard of the Holy Ancient One, the concealed of all” (134–42). GY owned a copy (YL 1292).

Dr. John Dee (1527–1608), a mathematician, geographer, and alchemist, as well as advisor to Queen Elizabeth, explored the world of magic and divination. In collaboration with Edward Kelley, Dee received angelic communications in the Enochian language that were used by later occultists, especially the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. See also 51; FPS 95–99; and AVA lix.

In a letter of September 9, 1933, to an unidentified correspondent who had inquired about the 1925 version of A Vision, WBY explains “scrying”: “The word ‘scrying’ is old English for such acts of clairvoyance as looking in a crystal” (CL InteLex 5938).

William Law (1686–1761) was a great promoter of the work of Jacob Boehme (see n30 above) in the English-speaking world. WBY refers to The Works of Jacob Behmen, the Teutonic Theosopher . . . left by the Rev. William Law (London: Joseph Richardson, 1763; YL 239). The “diagrams” are thirteen elaborate pen and ink drawings that appear at the back. According to the “Advertisement,” “The Figures annexed to this Volume, were left by the Reverend Mr. Law, and by him intended for Publication. They contain an Illustration of the deep Principles of Jacob Behmen, in which the Mysteries of Nature and Grace are unfolded.”

64 Concerning the Florentine architect, painter and sculptor Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (1475–1564), see also 21 and 211–13. Henry Crabb Robinson, a contemporary of William Blake, wrote about his visits to the poet in a diary, from which Yeats and Ellis quote the “entire reference to Blake” in WWB 1:142–50. Robinson notes Blake’s opinions: “Jacob Boehmen was spoken of as a divinely inspired man. Blake praised, too, the figures in Law’s translation as being very beautiful. Michael Angelo could not have done better” (WWB 1:144; The Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, ed. Thomas Sadler, 2nd ed. [London: Macmillan, 1869], 2:305).

La Divina Commedia, by Florentine poet Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), traces a path through Hell and Purgatory into Heaven. For the first two parts of the journey, Dante is guided by Virgil, but as that classical Roman poet is unable to enter the Christian heaven, Dante’s ideal beloved Beatrice Portinari (1266–90)—with whom Dante says he fell in love at first sight at age nine—guides him through the third section of the poem.

65 On May 22 [1936], WBY wrote to Dorothy Wellesley about a letter he sent to Laura Riding, noting “that poets were good liars who never forgot that the Muses were women who liked the embrace of gay warty lads” (L 857). Concerning the making of porcelain, Sutherland notes a correspondence with Mr. Hin-Cheung Lovell, Assistant Curator of Chinese Art at the Freer Gallery of Art of the Smithsonian Institution, who writes that “this statement is blatantly untrue in the context of Chinese ceramics” (Letter of June 7, 1973, qtd. in Sutherland, 642). Ludwig van Beethoven’s final complete symphony, Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125, was completed in 1824.

The source for virginity renewing itself like the moon is ultimately Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron and the story of Alatiel, protagonist of the seventh story of the second day, who sleeps with nine men but is able on her wedding night to convince her husband of her virginity. The story concludes: “E per ciò si disse: ‘Bocca basciata non perdre ventura, anzi rinnuova come fa la luna’ ” (ed. Vittore Branca [Torino: Einaudi, 1956], 164). In the not particularly literal translation of J. M. Rigg, “wherefore ’twas said: ‘Mouth, for kisses, was never the worse: like as the moon reneweth her course” (London: A. H. Bullen, 1903; YL 231). The anecdote was used for the title of a painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Bocca Baciata (1859), and is quoted by Shelley in Peter Bell III (lines 228–29) and by Verdi in Falstaff. See Robin Barrow, “An Identification in Yeats’s A Vision (B),” Notes and Queries June 2004: 162–63; and Massimo Bacigalupo, “Yeats, Boccaccio, and Leopardi,” Notes and Queries December 2005: 499–500. See also AVA 62 and 104 in this edition.

66 In Milton (1804), William Blake writes:

Every Time less than a pulsation of the artery

Is equal in its period & value to Six Thousand Years.

For in this Period the Poets Work is Done: and all the Great

Events of Time start forth & are conceivd in such a Period

Within a Moment: a Pulsation of the Artery.

(Milton, plates 28 & 29; Blake, 16–27)

67 The artistic style of geometric abstraction practiced by Wyndham Lewis was influenced by Cubism and by the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and Henri Bergson. The works of the Romanian-born sculptor Constantin Brancusi (1876–1957) often have a curvilinear quality and smooth contours. Works that could be described as “ovoid” include Prometheus (1911) and The Newborn (1915), and various versions of Sleeping Muse (1909–10) and Mademoiselle Pogany (1912ff.).

In a passage from “Dove or Swan” in AVA that was eliminated in AVB, WBY describes the modern period in art and letters, similarly examining the works of Lewis and Brancusi together (174). Yeats’s thinking about Brancusi here may draw from Ezra Pound’s “Brancusi” (1921, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot [Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1954]), esp. 442–43.

68 This passage is significantly reworked from its appearance in Packet:

Some will ask if I believe all that this book contains, and I will not know how to answer. Does the word belief, used as they will use it, belong to our age, can I think of the world as there and I here judging it? I will never think any thoughts but these, or some modification or extension of these; when I write prose or verse they must be somewhere present though not it may be in the words; they must affect my judgment of friends and of events; but then there are many symbolisms and none exactly resembles mine. What Leopardi in Ezra Pound’s translation calls that “concord” wherein “the arcane spirit of the whole mankind turns hardy pilot”—how much better it would be without that word “hardy” which slackens speed and adds nothing—persuades me that he has best imagined reality who has best imagined justice. (32–33)

This section was highly revised at various stages of composition.

69 WBY became a member of the Seanad Éireann, the upper house of the Oireachtas (the Senate and Houses of Parliament, respectively), in late 1922; he decided in late 1928 not to accept an offer to return after recuperation from illness. On July 30 [1928], WBY wrote to Lady Gregory, “Probably I have made my last Senate appearance. A little speech of three sentences, was followed by a minute of great pain & that comforts me for I find I could have been re-elected & that would have been 360 a year for nine years and I hate taking all that money from my family. Personally I gain greatly by the change. I have arranged two interviews & other things to fight the censor-ship so I am still in public life & shall be till I get to Rapallo. Glenavy stopped me coming out of the Senate the other day to say ‘the Senate will re-elect you whenever you like’. He meant they would co-opt me if I wished when there was a vacancy. I doubt it, but am pleased that he should think so” (CL InteLex 5137).

By contrast, WBY wrote to Pound on July 29, 1923, “My work at the Senate does not interfear [sic] as it is mainly in the afternoon—& it is just sufficiently exciting to fill the afternoon pleasantly. We are beginning to develop a little oratory & oratory too of a structured eighteenth century kind. The kind being probably because dread of bombs & bullets has, till very lately, kept us from admitting to the strangers gallery 20th century impatience & ignorance” (CL InteLex 4352).

70 Thomas Hood’s ballad “The Dream of Eugene Aram” (1831) tells the story of teacher and philologist Eugene Aram (1704–59) and his arrest for the murder of Daniel Clark. See also IDM 102.

71 The ancient Greek legend of Oedipus, son of Laius and Jocasta, king and queen of Thebes, who is fated to commit patricide and incest, is retold in Sophocles’s three Theban plays: Antigone, Oedipus Tyrannus, and Oedipus at Colonus. WBY translated the latter two in 1926 and 1927 (published 1928 and 1934); Plays 369–400, 401–441. The “four sacred things” are “the basin of brass, the hollow pear-tree, the marble tomb, the stone from Thoricus” (Plays 439). For earth “riven not by pain but by love,” see Plays 440. On this passage, see Arkins 124–41.

72 The Sphinx is a mythological monster with a human (female) head and body of a lion. She terrorized the city of Thebes, posing riddles and then killing those who could not answer them; Oedipus answers the riddle, slays her, and rescues the city.

Jonathan Swift’s prose satire Gulliver’s Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World (1726, 1735) follows its titular character’s voyage through fictional nations and eviction from the country of the Houyhnhnms, figures of ideal rationale and virtue. On returning to England, Gulliver is horrified at Britain’s vice and lack of reason. WBY owned two separate editions of this work, one edited and inscribed by Harold Williams (London: First Edition Club, 1926; YL 2041), and another edited and inscribed by John Hayward (London: Nonesuch Press, 1934; YL 2042). He additionally owned the 17-volume Works of the Rev. Dr. Jonathan Swift, Dean of St. Patrick’s Dublin, ed. Thomas Sheridan (London: Printed for W. Strahan, B. Collins and others, 1784; YL 2043).

Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (1855, 1857) ruminates on the limitations of modern culture. WBY owned this text in a French edition by Bibliotheca Mundi (Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, n.d.; YL 129).

73 According to Oedipus Tyrannus, when Oedipus blinds and exiles himself, his daughter Antigone accompanies him out of Thebes. William Shakespeare’s King Lear (1604–5) opens with an aging Lear dividing his kingdom among his three daughters, according to their professed affection for him. Cordelia is disinherited for professing to love her father according to her duty, but later in the play she receives him when his other daughters have turned him out and he has gone mad.

74 Located on the southwestern spur of Mount Parnassus, Delphi housed the Delphic oracle and a major site of worship of the god Apollo. The omphalos at Delphi was said to be the navel, or center, of the world. Hippeios Colonus, or Colonus of the Horses, is where Oedipus is traditionally buried; it is a deme of Athens and associated with the god Poseidon, who created horses.

75 Cruachan, in Co. Roscommon, Ireland, is the traditional capital of the ancient dynasties of Connacht. A ringfort or rath there is identified as the seat of Medb (Maeve) and Ailill, queen and king of the Connachta. Medb features prominently in the Ulster Cycle of mythological stories.

Crickmaa (Cnoc Meadha or Knockmaa) is a hill near Tuam in Co. Galway. It is traditionally the home of King Finvarra of the Sidhe. In “The Galway Plains” (1903), WBY describes a visit there and the folk association of the place with the Sidhe (EE 156). Cnoc Meadha is also mentioned in the story “The Crucifixion of the Outcast,” in The Secret Rose (Myth1 152, Myth2 102), there spelled Cruachmaa. In GY’s copy of A Vision (1937; YL 2434), “Crickmaa” is changed to “Cruchmaa.”

Anthony Raftery (Antoine Ó Raifteirí, c. 1748–1835) was an Irish-language oral poet who is often said to be the last of the Irish bards. He made a long poem called “Seanchus (nó Caisimirt) na Sgeiche” “The History of (or, Dispute with) the Bush,” which includes a curse on a bush for not keeping him dry in a rainstorm; the bush answers back with an entire history of Ireland. See the version collected by Douglas Hyde (Abhráin atá leagtha ar an Reachtúireor, Songs ascribed to Raftery: being the fifth chapter of the Songs of Connacht, collected, edited and translated by Douglas Hyde [An Craoibhín Aoibhínn] [Baile Átha Cliath: Gill, 1903], 284–321).

76 WBY quotes from the English translation of “The Life of Epaminondas” in Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. The Yeatses owned a copy of Thomas North’s elegant translation (8 vols.; Stratford-upon-Avon: Basil Blackwell for the Shakespeare Head Press, 1928; 8:19; YL 1597). “Wren boys” hunt a nonexistent wren on St. Stephen’s Day (December 26) in a folk custom commonly practiced in Ireland and elsewhere. The footnote in Packet lacks this note’s final sentence, which was added in WBY’s hand on the setting copy (36).

77 St. Catherine of Genoa, Caterinetta Fieschi Adorno (1447–1510), became patron saint of Genoa for her charitable work, her intense experiences of the saving presence of God, and her penances. For Michelangelo, see n64 above.

78 Pound published “The Return” as one of “Two Poems” in English Review 11:3 (June 1912), 343–44; and in October of that same year in his poetic volume Ripostes (London: Stephen Swift, 1912). The poem also appears in Personae (74), which collection WBY described in November 1928 as “a great excitement to me” (L 748). In his introduction to OBMV, WBY quotes the poem through line 14 (LE 193–94). As printed in A Vision (1937), this poem includes small differences from the text of Personae; see Table 3.

Stories of Michael Robartes and His Friends

1 The magus Michael Robartes, invented for the stories “Rosa Alchemica” (1896), “The Tables of the Law” (1896), and “The Adoration of the Magi” (1897), was also used as a named speaker of three poems in The Wind Among the Reeds (1899). For historical sources for this character, see Myth2 367–68 n1. Robartes and his counterpart Owen Aherne were revived in 1917 and 1918 (with a brother, John, added for Aherne), and they appear in poems and notes to the volumes The Wild Swans at Coole (1916, 1919) and Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921). As WBY explains in the Preface to The Wild Swans at Coole, “Michael Robartes and John Aherne . . . are characters in some stories I wrote years ago, who have once again become a part of the phantasmagoria through which I can alone express my convictions about the world” (VP 852; see also VP 821). The two versions of A Vision adopt different fictions involving these characters to explain the provenance of the system (and indeed, the genetic materials include early attempts to write the book itself as a dialogue between Robartes and Aherne [see YVP 4]). See AVA 221–22 n31.

This section follows Stories of Michael Robartes and his Friends: An Extract from a Record Made by his Pupils: And a Play in Prose by W. B. Yeats (Dublin: Cuala, 1931), a copy of which was used as the setting copy. For details, see Editors’ Introduction, xxxvi–xxxix. A complete list of changes appears in Hood, “Remaking,” 47–48; we note here only the most significant.

2 The characters Huddon, Duddon, and Daniel O’Leary occur (as “Hudden and Dudden and Donald O’Nery”) in the tale “Donald and his Neighbours,” in The Royal Hibernian Tales (Dublin: C. M. Warren, n.d.), included in WBY’s edition of Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (London: Walter Scott, 1888). They are mentioned in “Tom The Lunatic” from the 1931 collection Words For Music Perhaps (Poems 273). In Stories, the last line reads “But how they mock us burning out” ([viii]).

3 Prince Albert Road in the Regent’s Park area of London is an expensive and exclusive location. The London home of John B. Yeats, 23 Fitzroy Road, to which WBY’s family moved when he was two years old, was several blocks from Albert Road. In 1887, WBY took lodgings at 6 Berkley Road, Regent’s Park. Primrose Hill, a prominent landmark across Albert Road from Regent’s Park, was prophesied by the Yorkshire soothsayer Mother Shipton to become the center of London one day (Augustus Hare, Walks in London, 6th rev. ed. [London: George Allen, 1896], 2:112). Primrose Hill is also the site of Blake’s vision of the Spiritual Sun (WWB 1:144).

4 Owen Aherne, like his friend Michael Robartes, is a character returned to and refined over the course of years. See n1 above.

5 The world egg occurs in a number of religious and mythological traditions; see, for example, the summary by Madame Blavatsky in The Secret Doctrine 1:359–68. See AVA lxiv, 142, and 229 n65. See also Giorgio Melchiori, The Whole Mystery of Art: Pattern into Poetry in the Work of W. B. Yeats (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960), 164–99; and Raine, Yeats the Initiate (Montrath, Ireland: Dolmen Press; London: George Allen & Unwin, 1986), 111–48.

6 Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is frequently staged in London as elsewhere.

7 Realism as a theatrical movement involves the adoption of stylistic and dramatical conventions aimed at bringing a natural representation of real life to texts and performances. The movement, to which WBY was opposed, is associated with playwrights such as Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) and Anton Chekhov (1860–1904), and practitioners such as Constantin Stanislavski (1863–1938).

8 The social-realist plays of the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen explore the emotional currents that lie behind the façades of everyday life. They are unrelenting in their exposition and were often scandalous. William Archer (1856–1924) was a Scottish drama critic and editor who translated Ibsen’s plays into English. WBY refers to his translations in the introduction to OBMV (LE 185).

9 Denise has named herself after the writer of the play Axël (1890) by the French symbolist writer Jean-Marie-Mathias-Philippe-Auguste, comte de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (1838–89). WBY was fond of this play; he often cited passages from it and wrote an introduction to a fine-press edition published in 1925, designed and decorated by his friend the poet T. Sturge Moore (1870–1944) (Wade 275; introduction P&I 156–58).

10 The Café Royal was a restaurant and meeting place on 68 Regent Street in London’s Piccadilly. It was a place where the fashionable and the intellectual gathered, and famous patrons included Oscar Wilde and Aleister Crowley. It closed in 2008.

11 See the story “Rosa Alchemica” about this episode (Myth1 267–92; Myth2 177–91; and The Secret Rose, Stories by W. B. Yeats: A Variorum Edition, ed. Warwick Gould, Phillip L. Marcus, and Michael J. Sidnell, 2nd ed. [London: Macmillan, 1992], 126–50).

12 Judith, an apocryphal book present in the Septuagint and both Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Old Testaments, tells the story of the widow Judith, who ingratiates herself with the enemy general Holofernes before finally beheading him, thus defeating the Assyrian forces and saving Israel from threat.

13 The fictions of the ballet-dancer, the “fiery handsome girl of the poorer classes” (AVA lix), and this book, embedded in an essay by Owen Aherne, form the introduction to AVA (lvii–lxiv). The title of the book, meaning “The Mirror of Angels and Men,” was printed in incorrect Latin in AVA (l, lix). In correspondence, Frank Pearce Sturm pointed out to WBY that he could not get away with the egregious error, which was duly corrected for AVB. Giraldus has several possible historical antecedents, including Giraldus Cambrensis (Gerald de Barry), a Cambro-Norman historian who wrote about Ireland in the twelfth century; Gerard of Cremona (1114–87), a translator from Arabic into Latin and a scholar of Arabic science; and Lilio Gregorio Giraldus of Ferrara (1479–1552), a Latin poet, philosopher, and scholar, who was a friend of Pico della Mirandola and other prominent humanists (see Kathleen Raine, Yeats the Initiate, 408–30). Cracow was a center of printing in the early sixteenth century. Dee and Kelley (see 322–23 n63 above) had traveled there in 1584 and again in 1585.

14 A correction in the Coole Proofs (BL Add. 55893) adds a note pointing the reader to the engraving of “The Great Wheel” (see 48); this note appears in the 1962 edition.

15 The French illustrator, composer, and writer Edmund Dulac (1882–1953) made the portrait of Giraldus as well as “The Great Wheel” diagram (48) and the small illustration of a unicorn (47). Dulac, one of the most well-known illustrators of the day, collaborated with WBY on various projects, including designing masks, costumes, makeup, and sets for theatrical productions, as well as composing music for the stage and radio.

On January 10, 1918, soon after deciding to publish the results of the AS using the fictions of Giraldus and the mysterious Judwali tribe, WBY wrote Dulac, “Every evening the Speculum of Gyraldus becomes more imposing. I am more and more astonished at the profundity of that learned author and at the neglect into which he has fallen, a neglect only comparable to that which has covered with the moss of oblivion the even more profound work of Kusta iben Luka of Bagdad, whose honour remains alone in the obscure sect of the Jadwalis” (CL InteLex 3388). In a letter dated February 15, 1918, Dulac sent WBY a sketch of the portrait, which WBY thought “a masterpiece” (CL InteLex 3411).

The portrait, like the book, took much longer than anticipated to complete. Although WBY had sent “remainder of Speculum” to Dulac in January 1919, other work (and many events) seem to have taken precedence for both artist and writer. On July 17, 1923, with the book nearly finished, WBY wrote to Sturge Moore that he was “very anxious to have a talk with you about the big design for the philosophy book” (LTSM 47–48). A week later, though, on July 24, Dulac wrote saying that he had “done a sketch in pencil of the portrait of Gyraldus by an unknown artist of the early sixteenth century” and asking whether the date was right and if there were “Any device to be incorporated?” (LWBY 439). WBY wrote back that “The date is nothing; if you want early sixteenth century let it be 1524 or any date you please. I have not thought of any particular device. He would certainly be an astrologer & a mathematician & this is about all I know” (CL InteLex 4602). On August 18, WBY had to withdraw his offer to Moore: “I find that Dulac has actually begun designs for my philosophy or rather practically finished a portrait of Giraldus as frontispiece. He offered some time ago but I had not taken him seriously as I know how busy he is. He says he wants to do also the big diagram to keep the two in harmony. If he does so I shall ask you to do something else for me instead” (LTSM 49). Dulac did send a sketch on September 30, 1923, writing, “Here is the best I can do with Gyraldus. It is a little ‘early’ in style, but I think it better suited to a book of that kind than the ‘Durer’ manner. One can argue that Mr Gyraldus did not go to a first class artist as otherwise the book would be known” (LWBY 439).

16 On October 24, 1924, Frank Pearce Sturm wrote to WBY, “I cannot trace Gyraldus. He is not Giraldus Cambrensis, but may be Gerard (or Gerald) of Cremona, who gave his life & great wealth to translation and had a go at everything from Aristotle to Kusta ben Luki. His passion was the Almagest, which he translated into what then passed for Latin in 1175” (FPS 86). Richard Taylor suggests that WBY’s mention of “Bologna” may have been an erroneous substitution for “Cremona” (FPS 58). Alternately, WBY may refer to the Italian Carmelite theologian Gerardo di Bologna (d. 1317). See n13.

17 WBY may borrow this lamp from Axël by Villiers de l’Isle Adam. In the third act, Axël says “I know that lamp, it was burning before Solomon” (as quoted in LE 33). Other possible sources are accounts of finding the body of Father Christian Rosenkreuz, which, according to WBY in an early essay, describe his body being buried surrounded by “inextinguishable magical lamps” (EE 144).

18 In his Critique of Pure Reason (1781, 1787), one of the major works of modern Western philosophy, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) asserts four antinomies of reason, or countering claims about the nature of reality that have equal validity.

19 Stories contains a variation here: “. . . or, as I prefer; thesis, there is no end. I cry out ‘My love will never end’ ” (9).

20 The Church of the Holy Sepulcher, in the old walled city of Jerusalem, contains the place venerated as Jesus’ tomb; it is located on the site of what many Christians believe to be Golgotha (or Calvary), the hill where Jesus was crucified.

21 Called Bacleones (or perhaps Badeones, i.e., Bedouins) in an early manuscript (YVP 4:122), this fictitious group may get its name from Sir Edward Denison Ross (1871–1940), an Orientalist and linguist. Ross may have invented the slightly incorrect Arabic term when WBY approached him for help with the “fable”; see S. B. Bushrui, “Yeats’s Arabic Interests,” in A. Norman Jeffares and K. G. W. Cross, eds., In Excited Reverie: A Centenary Tribute to William Butler Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1965), 295–97.

22 Thomas Edward Lawrence (1888–1955), also known as Lawrence of Arabia, was an archaeologist and British army officer renowned for his role during the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire (1916–18). The Yeatses owned a copy of his autobiographical account, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (London: Jonathan Cape, 1935; YL 1094). In 1932, WBY nominated him for membership in the Irish Academy of Letters.

23 Stories lacks this interruption. Instead, after Denise declares her plan to tell her story, the text reads, “Her story was never told; for at that moment Aherne ushered in a pale slight woman . . .” (11).

24 Stories reads: “We will call them John Bond and Mary Bell from the characters in a doggerel of Blake’s. For reasons which will become apparent when you have heard their story you must not know their true names” (11). As this variant indicates, the names of John Bond and Mary Bell are alterations from the names of characters in two poems in Blake’s Pickering Manuscript, “Long John Brown & Little Mary Bell” and “William Bond” (whose beloved is Mary Green), Blake 496–98.

25 Denise’s story, beginning here and continuing through 32, is not included in Stories. As Wayne K. Chapman notes, this episode was suppressed until WBY “was well into the correction of proof copy for A Vision and motivated by a desire to entertain and perhaps shock Dorothy Wellesley.” He cites a letter written by WBY to Wellesley on July 26, 1936, “To-morrow I write a story to be added to the Michael Robartes series (a prelude to A Vision which I am now revising in proof). It is an almost exact transcript from fact. I have for years been creating a group of strange disorderly people on whom Michael Robartes confers the wisdom of the east” (L 859; “Denise’s Story: W. B. Yeats, Dorothy Wellesley, and the Remaking of ‘Stories of Michael Robartes and His Friends: An Extract from a Record Made by His Pupils,’ ” New Hibernia Review / Iris Éireannach Nua [Earrach/Spring 2013], 134–38; see also “Remaking,” 47). Chapman provides transcription of these manuscript leaves (NLI 30,390 and 13,593) on 144–51. The last sentence of the previous paragraph was added to make a transition to Denise’s story.

26 See n9 above. The final scene of Axël contains the famous line “Vivre? Les serviteurs feront cela pour nous.”

27 In the Yeatses’ copy of the 1938 printing (YL 2435), GY has underlined “malachite,” and written in pencil beside this line, “Masefield’s gift to WBY!”

28 The French writer and historian Francoise Marie Arouet de Voltaire (1694–1778), whose best-known pen name is Voltaire, had a longstanding relationship with the mathematician and physicist Gabrielle-Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, marquise du Châtelet, whose older husband tolerated their affair for many years.

29 The Natural History collection, part of the National Museum of Ireland, is known for its zoological holdings and antique, nineteenth-century-style organization. It is housed in the center of Dublin in a building opened in 1857, which was originally an extension of Leinster House (former home of the Royal Dublin Society, now housing the Dáil or Irish Parliament).

30 Arthur Young (1741–1820) was an English writer who published A Tour in Ireland in 1780. Three of Young’s works (though not this one) are recorded in the list of books in the library at Coole. Lady Gregory mentions Young twice in her diary, once in 1920 and once in 1921. In spring 1920, she wrote,

I think of all the arguments—through so many storms, through 150 years or more, Coole has been a place of peace. We came through the Land League days and through the sale of the outlying property without war, without police protection or any application to the country for compensation—for there were no outrages. . . . Coole has been not only a place of peace during all that time, but a home of culture in more senses than one. Arthur Young found Mr. Gregory making a “noble nursery, the plantations for which would change the face of the district” and those woods still remain; my husband added rare trees to them and I have added acres and acres of young wood.

(Lady Gregory: The Journals, ed. Daniel J. Murphy [2 vols.; Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1978], 1:148; this passage appears also in Lady Gregory’s Journals, 1916–1930, ed. Lennox Robinson [London: Putnam & Company, 1946], 15)

On August 1, 1921, she mentions “old Robert Gregory’s planting so as to ‘change the character of the county’ as Arthur Young says” (Lady Gregory: The Journals, 2:283). Neither phrase appears in Young’s Tour; insofar as Gregory quotes it differently each time, her Journals suggest that she may have written this quotation without checking the source.

Lady Gregory, who believed strongly that “Ireland, more than other countries, ought to be a country of trees,” planted many thousands of trees at Coole Park (“Tree Planting,” The Irish Homestead 4 [February 12 and 19, 1898]: 141). The estate was taken over by the Forestry Commission in 1927, though she continued to live in the house for the remainder of her life. In early 1909, WBY commented in his journal, “Lady Gregory is planting trees; for a year they have taken up much of her time. Her grandson will be fifty years old before they can be cut. We artists, do not we also plant trees and it is only after some fifty years that we are of much value?” (Mem 155–56; Au 350).

31 In Dramatis Personae, WBY describes Coole House: “In the hall, or at one’s right hand as one ascended the stairs, hung . . . portraits of the members of Grillion’s Club, illuminated addresses presented in Ceylon or Galway, signed photographs or engravings of Tennyson, Mark Twain, Browning, Thackeray, at a later date paintings of Galway scenery by Sir Richard Burton, bequeathed at his death, and etchings by Augustus John” (Au 293).

Grillion’s was a nonpartisan dining club in London founded in 1812 as a meeting place for men interested in contemporary discussions. It took its name from the Grillion’s Hotel on Albemarle Street where the first meetings were held; illustrious members included several prime ministers. In 1826, a motion was passed to commission engraved portraits of members, 274 of which are housed in the National Portrait Gallery in London.

32 The Foreign Office was the British governmental department responsible for promoting and protecting the interests of the nation overseas.

33 The Chancery courts addressed complaints that could not be resolved in the common law courts. Oliver Goldsmith (1730–74) was a playwright, novelist, and poet, author of The Vicar of Wakefield, She Stoops to Conquer, and “The Deserted Village,” among other works. Edmund Burke (1729–97) was a philosopher, political theorist, and statesman, author of A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime And Beautiful; his political theories have been widely influential in conservative political thought. Both Goldsmith and Burke were Anglo-Irish, and statues of both (by John Henry Foley) are in the yard by the front gates of Trinity College Dublin. WBY mentions them as his symbolic forebears in several late works: see, inter alia, “Blood and the Moon” and “The Seven Sages” (Poems 241–42, 245–46); and The Senate Speeches of W. B. Yeats, ed. Donald R. Pearce (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960), 99, 172. Thomas Gainsborough (1727–88) was an English portrait and landscape painter known for meticulous detail and acute observation; he was a founding member of the Royal Academy along with his rival Joshua Reynolds, but his relationship with the Academy was uneasy.

34 Sir Peter Lely (1618–80) was a painter of Dutch origin, born Pieter van der Faes in Soest, Westphalia. He moved to London and became one of the more prominent portrait painters at court, holding the post of Principal Painter in Ordinary to Charles II. He was also one of the early proponents of the mezzotint, helping to bring this tonal method of printmaking to Britain. Sir William Pitt (1708–78), first Earl of Chatham, was a Whig statesman, wartime political leader, and brilliant orator, who led Britain in the Seven Years’ War. He was known as Pitt the Elder or Chatham to distinguish him from his son, Pitt the Younger. The author Horace Walpole (1717–97), fourth Earl of Orford, was an antiquarian, art historian, Whig politician, and writer. He is best known for his home Strawberry Hill, a villa in Twickenham that anticipated the Gothic Revival, and for his popular gothic novel The Castle of Otranto.

35 Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617–82) is the most widely known painter in the Spanish Baroque style, known for religious paintings and idealized portraits. The Grand Tour was a traditional tour of Europe for young men from the upper classes in Europe and, eventually, the Americas, popular between the mid-seventeenth century until the advent of travel by steamship and rail in the mid-nineteenth century. John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) was the leading portrait painter of his time. He was born in the United States but lived most of his life in Europe, training in Paris and working for many years in London. His work is famous for large striking canvases of wealthy women and for depictions of Edwardian luxury. He made a charcoal portrait of WBY that was used as frontispiece to Vol. 1, Poems Lyrical and Narrative, of the 1908 collected edition (Wade 75) and several others (Wade 128, 139, 165, 177, 178, 209, and 211d).

36 Genesis, the first book of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament, includes a tale of creation featuring the first man and woman (Adam and Eve) in the garden of Eden. If interpreted through the Christian doctrine of original sin, the story means that humans are separated from God at birth due to a fall from grace.

37 Cuckoos are a family of mostly arboreal birds common to many areas of the world. A distinguishing feature of many species, and one by which they are known in popular culture, is brood parasitism, whereby they lay their eggs in the nests of other birds.

38 See Luke 2:25–29.

39 Swift’s Discourse of the Contests and Dissensions between the Nobles and the Commons in Athens and Rome With the Consequences They Had upon Both These States was published by John Nutt in 1701. It outlines Swift’s views on national politics, likening contemporary England to the ancient world. In his diary, WBY claims that this essay “might be for us [the Irish] what Vico is to the Italians, had we a thinking nation” (Diary 1930, Ex 292) and that it “is more important to modern thought than Vico and certainly foreshadowed Flinders Petrie, Frobenius, Henry Adams, Spengler, and very exactly and closely Gerald Heard. . . . He [Swift] saw civilisations ‘exploding’—to use Heard’s term—just before the final state, and that final state as a tyranny, and he took from a Latin writer the conviction that every civilisation carried with it from the first what shall bring it to an end” (313–34).

40 One of the fragments of the Greek lyric poet Sappho (c. 610–c. 570 BCE) speaks of an egg of hyancinthine blue (Edgar Lobel and Denis Page, eds., Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955], 166).

41 Teheran, also Tehran, is the capital city of Persia (Iran).

42 Under the reign of the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid (c. 763–809 CE), the fifth and most famous Abbasid caliph, Baghdad became the world’s preeminent center of trade, learning, and culture. WBY read of Harun in The Arabian Nights (YL 251 and 676) and in Gibbon (YL 746).

The ancient trading city Byzantium, located on the Bosphorus, was rebuilt and established as the capital of the Roman Empire by Constantine in 330 CE. Renamed Constantinople, it was the capital of the Roman and Byzantine Empires. After its conquest by Ottoman Turks in 1453, it became the capital of the Ottoman Empire. The city has been known by its Turkish name, Istanbul, since the formation of the modern Turkish state in 1923. Byzantium is of great importance in the system and the works that use it (such as the poems “Sailing to Byzantium” and “Byzantium,” Poems 197–98, 252–53; for an overview of sources and criticism, see Liebregts 298–307). In the historical overview in Book V, the midpoint between the primary and the antithetical poles in the cycle of about 1,000 years (half of the larger 2,000-year gyre), is expressed by the reign of Justinian, representing the full flowering of Byzantine culture and power. See 202–5.

43 The Antonines were Roman emperors who ruled from roughly 138–92 CE: Antoninus Pius (138–61 CE), Marcus Aurelius (161–80), with Commodus (180–92) sometimes added under the appellation. They ruled the empire at the height of its power and influence, from which point Gibbon begins his narrative of decline and fall. Sparta was a prominent city state in ancient Greece, situated in the Peloponnesian region of Laconia or Lacedaemonia. The second-century traveler Pausanias, who wrote guide-books for ancient tourists, describes a temple of Hilaeira and Phoebe, daughters of Apollo, in which “has been hung from the roof an egg tied to ribands, and they say that it is the famous egg that legend says Leda brought forth,” Description of Greece 3.16.1 (Books 3–5, trans. W. H. S. Jones and H. A. Ormerod [Loeb, 1918], 96–97). The Yeatses’ library contains a copy of Books 1 and 2 of Pausanias (YL 1545); cf. 197. Other translations of Pausanias include those of Thomas Taylor (1784) and Sir James G. Frazer (1898), both of whom were admired by WBY. An “unhatched egg of Leda’s” is discussed also in the 1927 version of The Resurrection (VPl 918).

44 In ancient Greek legend, Leda was the daughter of the Aetolian king Thestius, the wife of King Tyndareus of Sparta, and the mother of Helen, Clytemnestra, Castor, and Pollux. Zeus raped Leda in the guise of a swan, impregnating her after she had just conceived with her husband. Two eggs were hatched containing Helen, Clytemnestra, Castor, and Pollux, although ancient sources differ on the question of which progeny were mortal and which were immortal, and which came from which egg. The story that most closely matches the pairing here is told by Apollodorus in the Library 3.10.7, trans. J. G. Frazer (2 vols.; Loeb, 1921), 2:23; this is the first source mentioned in the entry on “Leda” in the Encyclopaedia Brittanica (16:358). See Arkins (100) and Liebregts (280–81) for discussion.

45 As told in numerous versions, notably the Oresteia by Aeschylus, Clytemnestra was the wife of Agamemnon, who murdered him and the prophetess Cassandra. Helen was the wife of Menelaus; her abduction by Paris brought about the Trojan War. Castor and Pollux (or Polydeuces) were called the Dioscuri (sons of Zeus) or Tyndaridae (sons of Tyndareus), who, after the death of the mortal twin, were transformed by Zeus into the constellation Gemini. In ancient Greek, Roman, and early Christian cultures, they were revered as patrons of sailors and athletes in particular.

46 See n18 above. The third of Kant’s four antinomies has to do with the question of freedom. It states:

Thesis.

There are in the World Causes [acting] through Freedom [Liberty].

Antithesis.

There is no Liberty, but all is Nature.

WBY marked this quotation in his copy of J. P. Mahaffey and J. H. Bernard, Kant’s Critical Philosophy for English Readers, 3rd ed., Vol. 2: The Prolegomena (London: Macmillan, 1915), 103; YL 1052.

47 On October 9 [1929], WBY sent Frank Pearce Sturm six propositions, including this first: “Reality is a timeless & spaceless community of spirits which perceive each other & perceive nothing else . . . Each spirit is determined by, and determines those it perceives. Each spirit is unique” (FPS 101). In Diary 1930, WBY writes, “I think that two conceptions, that of reality as a congeries of beings, that of reality as a single being, alternate in our emotion and in history, and must always remain something that human reason, because subject always to one or the other, cannot reconcile” (Ex 305).

48 In the Hebrew Bible, the witch of Endor is a woman commanded by King Saul to summon up the spirit of the prophet Samuel in order to ask for his advice about the warring Philistines (1 Samuel 28).

49 From All’s Well That Ends Well 1.1.86 by English playwright and poet William Shakespeare (1564–1616).

50 Thermopylae is a pass on the east coast of Greece where a battle was joined in 480 BCE, during the second Persian invasion of Greece, between a small Greek force led by King Leonidas of Sparta and the Persian army led by Xerxes. The battle, in which the Greeks held off the Persians long enough to accomplish their larger strategic purpose before dying to the last man, is often invoked as a symbol of dauntless courage against great odds.

51 In Stories, Aherne adds another line to this statement: “You are not sane when you talk like that” (22).

52 The Irish Civil War (1922–23) was fought between supporters (the Free State or National Army) and opponents (anti-treaty forces or Irregulars) of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which was signed in 1921 at the end of the War of Independence. The artist, playwright, and novelist Jack B. Yeats (1871–1957) was the brother of WBY. From the 1920s, he became interested in Expressionism, and later paintings characteristically display vigorous and experimental uses of paint.

53 “The Phases of the Moon” and “The Double Vision of Michael Robartes” (Poems 164–68, 172–74) were two of the poems added to the Macmillan edition of The Wild Swans at Coole (1919; Wade 124, 125), expanded from its original fine press edition (Cuala Press, 1917; Wade 118). “The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid,” written in 1923, was first published in English Life and The Illustrated Review and The Dial (1924), then in the volumes The Cat and the Moon and Certain Poems (Cuala, 1924; Wade 145). It appears at the beginning of Book II of AVA 97–102. It is a thinly disguised biographical parallel to the occultistic aspects of the marriage between WBY and GY: Harun al-Rashid gives Kusta ben Luka a bride who unexpectedly speaks and writes words of otherworldly wisdom while asleep, shortly after their wedding. The poem was included in The Tower (1928, Wade 158).

54 Kusta ben Luka (Qusta ibn Luqa, 820–912 CE) was a doctor and translator of Greek and Syrian texts into Arabic; a letter from Frank Pearce Sturm to WBY suggests that WBY’s source for the name was Sir Edward Denison Ross (FPS 86).

In a letter of October 11, 1924, Sturm pointed out to WBY the difficulty of these characters’ dates:

Fifty seven years after the death of Harun-al-Rashid the Mechanica of Hero of Alexandria was translated into Arabic by Costa ibn Luca, whom you call Kusta ben Luka. He therefore could not have been an old man when the Caliph made him a present of the sleep-walking girl, unless he lived to a very great age indeed. I know you hate pedantry, & so do I, but if “A Vision” is to be founded on supposedly existing MS, the dates will have to be right. The Caliph died in 809. Kusta was still hard at work with his pen in 866. (FPS 83)

55 Leaf 27 of NLI 13,577 includes a footnote, pointing to this spot in the text: “* I published in 1925 a book inaccurate confused obscure incomplete [“incomplete” inserted above the line] work called “A Vision” I have worked. It has beside me now corrected, clarified & completed after four years four years almost continuous labour.” The note is retained in Stories.

56 In the Meno dialogue, Socrates proposes that “all enquiry and all learning is but recollection” (81), The Dialogues, trans. B. Jowett (5 vols.; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1875), 1:282, YL 1586.

57 See n15 above.

58 “Rosa Alchemica” and “The Tables of the Law” were published in 1896, and “The Adoration of the Magi” in 1897.

59 My brother Owen: the three stories from the 1890s featured only one Aherne, i.e., Owen. By 1918, however, possibly due to misremembering his old character’s given name, WBY had added John. The preface to The Wild Swans at Coole explains that

I have the fancy that I read the name John Aherne among those of men prosecuted for making a disturbance at the first production of “The Play Boy,” which may account for his animosity to myself. (VP 852)

“The Play Boy” is The Playboy of the Western World by J. M. Synge. Kabbala Denudata, by Christian Knorr von Rosenroth (1636–89), was translated into English as The Kabbalah Unveiled by WBY’s old friend and fellow magician S. L. MacGregor Mathers in 1887. Howth is a suburb of Dublin located on a peninsula in the north of the city, where WBY lived with his family between 1881 and 1884. The pier is on the northern side of the peninsula.

60 In his “Introduction” to AVA, Owen Aherne reports that he “felt a slight chill” when Robartes mentioned trying to find Yeats,

for we had both quarrelled with Mr Yeats on what I considered good grounds. Mr Yeats had given the name of Michael Robartes and that of Owen Aherne to fictitious characters, and made those characters live through events that were a travesty of real events. “Remember,” I said, “that he not only described your death but represented it as taking place amid associations which must, I should have thought, have been highly disagreeable to an honourable man.” “I was fool enough to mind once,” he said, “but I soon found that he had done me a service. His story started a rumour of my death that became more and more circumstantial as it grew. One by one my correspondents ceased to write. My name had become known to a large number of fellow-students, and but for that rumour I could not have lived in peace even in the desert[.”] . . . “What have you to say to Yeats?” I said, and instead of answering he began to describe his own life since our last meeting. “You will remember the village riot which Yeats exaggerated in ‘Rosa Alchemica.’ A couple of old friends died of their injuries, and that, and certain evil results of another kind, turned me for a long time from my favourite studies[.”] (lvii–lix)

61 “Absolute poetry” and “pure poetry” gesture toward late nineteenth-century movements such as French Symbolism and English Aestheticism with their emphases on aesthetic or immaterial effects rather than a physical world. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia by Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86) is a pastoral and romantic prose work in a highly ornate style; it was extremely popular in its day but eclipsed by the rise of the novel.

62 Leaf 29v of NLI 13,577 contains this postscript to John Aherne’s letter, struck through: “PS. I enclose some photographs Duddon took from 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.”

63 Stories here turns to The Resurrection (Plays 481–92).

The Phases of the Moon

1 Connemara is a region in the west of Ireland (Co. Galway), known for its rugged yet beautiful landscape. Historically, it was a very poor part of Ireland and many of its inhabitants suffered terribly during the Famine. “Connemara cloth” is presumably homespun, of the sort worn by Synge’s Aran islanders and men and women of the west in Jack B. Yeats’s paintings. The imagined figure in “The Fisherman” wears “grey Connemara clothes” (Poems 148), but WBY notes in The Trembling of the Veil the ironies of this symbol of Irish nationalism: “ ‘Public opinion’, said an anonymous postcard sent to a friend of mine, ‘will compel you to learn Irish’, and it certainly did compel many persons of settled habits to change tailor and cloth. I believed myself dressed according to public opinion, until a letter of apology from my tailor informed me that ‘It takes such a long time getting Connemara cloth as it has to come all the way from Scotland’ ” (Au 272).

2 The setting of the poem is Ballylee, the Yeatses’ tower near Gort and Coole Park.

3 “Milton’s Platonist” refers to the title character of “Il Penseroso” (1632), an ode to melancholy by English poet John Milton (1608–74). This passage refers to lines 85–92:

Or let my lamp at midnight hour,

Be seen in some high lonely tower,

Where I may oft outwatch the Bear,

With thrice great Hermes, or unsphere

The spirit of Plato to unfold

What Worlds, or what vast regions hold

The immortal mind that hath forsook

Her mansion in this fleshly nook . . .

(The Poems of John Milton, ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler [London and Harlow: Longmans, Green, 1968], 143)

The references to the constellation Ursa Major (the Great Bear), which never sets if seen from the Northern Hemisphere; Hermes Trismegistus; and the summoning of the spirit of Plato from his celestial sphere offer parallels between “Milton’s Platonist” and the figure (presumably WBY) in this tower. See Wayne K. Chapman on the Miltonic and Platonic scaffolding of the poem (“ ‘Metaphors for Poetry’: Concerning the Poems of A Vision and Certain Plays for Dancers,” Mann et al., 261–64).

4 The “visionary prince” is the title character of “Prince Athanase” (1817) by the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), whose work was greatly important to WBY. Shelley echoes the lines from Milton above:

The Balearic fisher, driven from shore,

Hanging upon the peakèd wave afar,

Then saw their lamp from Laian’s turret gleam,

Piercing the stormy darkness, like a star. . . .

(Shelley 1:182)

5 The English printmaker and landscape painter Samuel Palmer (1805–81) was known especially for works inspired by the style of Blake, often produced in Shoreham, Kent; a group of fellow artists and he were known as the Ancients or Shoreham Ancients. WBY refers here to the engraving entitled The Lonely Tower illustrating “Il Penseroso” in The Shorter Poems of John Milton (London: Seeley, 1889). See Chapman, “ ‘Metaphors for Poetry,’ ” 246 n14.

6 The English essayist and critic Walter Pater (1839–94) was known for the richness and depth of his language, and for such works as The Renaissance (1878), a collection of essays about Renaissance humanists and artists. His Marius the Epicurean (1885) displays Pater’s ideal of the aesthetic life, his cult of beauty as opposed to bare asceticism, and his theory of the pursuit of beauty as an ideal of its own. The Yeatses’ library contains a copy as printed in 2 volumes (London: Macmillan, 1902; YL 1537).

Robartes’s death is alluded to in “The Adoration of the Magi” (Myth1 310, Myth2 202) and mentioned in notes to Michael Robartes and the Dancer (VP 821) and in Owen Aherne’s “Introduction” to AVA (lviii–lix); see also 327 n1 and 339 n60.

7 This phrase, slightly misquoted, is from the second edition of John Milton’s The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (London, 1644); WBY also used it in his essay “J. M. Synge and the Ireland of his Time,” published in The Cutting of an Agate (1912, EE 245). Wayne Chapman notes that “mine author” is Plato (“The Miltonic Crux of ‘The Phases of the Moon,’ ” YA 8 [1991]: 65–66 and 76 n23) and that WBY probably found the phrase in his copy of Prose of Milton, ed. Richard Garnett (London: Scott, [1911]), 238 (see Edward O’Shea, “The 1920s Catalogue of W. B. Yeats’s Library,” YA 4 [1986], ed. Warwick Gould, 286). Chapman suggests that WBY might have noted the passage by reading the preface to the five-volume edition by J. A. St John (1848–54).

8 See Book I, Part III: “The Twenty-eight Incarnations” (79–136). “The full” refers to Phase 15; “the moon’s dark” is Phase 1; “all the crescents” include Phases 2–27; “but six-and-twenty” indicates that Phase 1 and Phase 15 are not phases of human life; “the first crescent to the half” embraces Phases 2–8; “the moon is rounding” refers to Phases 9–14.

9 In Iliad 1:197, Athena grabs Achilles by the hair and then urges him to curb his passion rather than battle Agamemnon.

10 After Hector kills Achilles’s friend Patroclus, Achilles, overly enraged, kills Hector and desecrates his body, dragging it before the walls of Troy and refusing it funeral rites. See Iliad 22.330.

11 The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) is listed as an example for Phase 12 (see 95), perhaps because of the Nietzschean idea of the Übermensch, which establishes a natural hierarchy of the strong over the weak, or because of his concept of “will to power,” a process of expansion and venting of creative energy that he believed was the basic driving force of nature.

12 According to Exodus 19:1–25, Sinai is the mountain where God gave the Ten Commandments to Moses. Whether this place is the same as the modern Jabal Musa (“Moses’ Mountain”) on the Sinai Peninsula is a matter of contention. See also Exodus 34 and 35.

13 In the 1937 printing, the beginning of this line reads “For perfected, completed. . . .” In the Yeatses’ copies of the 1937 printing (YL 2434) and the 1938 printing (YL 2435), the line is corrected to “For separate, perfect. . . .” This change is also made on the first-pull Coole proofs, noted in Thomas Mark’s notebook, and implemented in the 1962 edition.

14 Cf. an early typescript, in which Michael Robartes says that WBY in PASL “contends that a man of genius works at whatever task—among those not impossible—is hardest to him, for in that way he finds his direct opposite, that which most stirs his desire, and so the greater the opposition the greater the genius.” “Yes,” says Owen Aherne, “I remember thinking that the one original thing in the book” (YVP 4:14). See also LE 8–9.

15 Hugh Kenner has suggested (“A Possible Source in Coleridge for ‘The Phases of the Moon,’ ” YAACTS 3 [1985]: 173–74) that WBY may here be remembering a passage in the Biographia Literaria (ed. James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge 7 [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973], pt. 1, 231) where Coleridge translates a passage from Herder’s Briefe, das Studium der Theologie betreffend (1790):

With the greatest possible solicitude avoid authorship. Too early or immoderately employed, it makes the head waste and the heart empty; even were there no other worse consequences. A person, who reads only to print, in all probability reads amiss; and he, who sends away through the pen and press every thought, the moment it occurs to him, will in a short time have sent all away, and will be a mere journeyman of the printing-office, a compositor.

WBY owned a copy of the Biographia Literaria (London: George Bell, 1876; YL 401).

16 The reference is to Phases 26–28; see 131–35.

17 Like the portrait of Giraldus and the image of the Great Wheel, the illustration of a unicorn was made by Edmund Dulac. Its placement, pasted into the book at this point (in AVA as well as AVB), remedied a small confusion. As Dulac explained to WBY in a letter of April 30, 1925, accompanying his finished diagram of the Great Wheel,

When it [the diagram] was done I remembered that in your description of it you mention that the square in the center is occupied by a design of a unicorn. Thence the accompanying design of the Animal in question. If it is not absolutely necessary that the Diagram should incorporate it leave it as it is, but if its presence in the Diagram is of vital importance, the engraver can make the two blocks and fit that of the Unicorn in its proper place for purposes of printing. Otherwise it may be used as a tail piece somewhere else in the book. (LWBY 462)

There was confusion at the printer about the placement of this image. Macmillan wrote to WBY on March 17, 1937, “The printers are asking us for the block which should apparently come at the end of the ‘The Phases of the Moon’ in ‘A Vision’. They have been unable to obtain a copy of the earlier edition of that work, and we accordingly write to ask if you could once more lend us the marked copy from which the text was set up, in order that we may see what block it is they require” (BL Add. 55792, f. 175). WBY responded with confusion, thinking they were unclear about placement of one of the diagrams, but nevertheless asked GY to send the copy (CL InteLex 6867). In Stories, this illustration appears on the title page.

The image recalls Monoceros de Astris, the title given an aspirant in the Practicus grade of the Order of the Golden Dawn. In 1920, WBY explained in a letter to his sister Elizabeth Corbet (Lolly) that “Unicorn from the Stars . . . is a private symbol belonging to my mystical order & nobody knows what it comes from. It is the soul” (CL InteLex 3787). Cf. WBY’s plays Where There Is Nothing (1902), The Unicorn from the Stars (1908), and The Player Queen (1922).