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ISBN:
9780684807331
Publication Date:
January 1970
Page Count:
384
€ 10.00
Book Description:
The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Volume X111: A Vision is part of a fourteen-volume series under the general editorship of eminent Yeats scholar George Bornstein and formerly the late Richard J. Finneran and Georges Mills Harper. One of the strangest works of literary modernism, A Vision is Yeat's greatest occult work.
Edited by scholars Catherine E. Paul and Margaret Mills Harper, the volume presents the "system" of philosophy, psychology, history and the life and soul that Yeats and his wife George (nee Hyde Lees) received and created by means of meduimistic experiments from 1917 through the early 1920's. Yeats obsessively revised the book, and the revised 1937 version is much more widely available than it's predesssor. The original 1925 version of A Vision, poetic, unpolished, masked in fiction and close to the excitement of the automatic writing that the Yeatses believed to be it's supernatural origin, is presented here in a scholarly edition for the first time.
The text, minimally corrected to retain the sense of the original, is extensively annotated, with particular attention paid to the relationship between the published book and it's complex genetic materials. Indispensable to an understanding of the poet's late work and entrancing on it's own merit, A Vision aims to be, all at once, a work of theoretical history, an esoteric philosophy, an aesthetic symboloty, a psychological schema and a sacred book. It is as difficult as it is essential reading for any students of Yeats.