Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Content
- List of Figures and Diagrams
- Preface
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- “Everywhere that antinomy of the One and the Many”: The Foundations of A Vision
- The Is and the Ought, the Knower and the Known: An Analysis of the Four Faculties in Yeats's System
- “Spiritual Intellect's Great Work”: A Discussion of the Principles and A Vision's Account of Death The
- Ancient Frames: Classical Philosophy in Yeats's A Vision
- “Timeless and Spaceless”?—Yeats's Search for Models of Interpretation in Post-Enlightenment Philosophy, Contemporary Anthropology and Art History, and the Effects of These Theories on “The Completed Symbol,” “The Soul in Judgment” and “The Great Year of the Ancients”
- W. B. Yeats's A Vision: “Dove or Swan”
- The Thirteenth Cone
- Shifting Sands: Dancing the Horoscope in the Vision Papers
- “Metaphors for Poetry”: Concerning the Poems of A Vision and Certain Plays for Dancers
- A Vision of Ezra Pound
- Reflected Voices, Double Visions
- Yeats's Vision and the Feminine
- Esotericism and Escape
- The Political Occult: Revisiting Fascism, Yeats and A Vision
- Glossary
- Index
The Political Occult: Revisiting Fascism, Yeats and A Vision
- Frontmatter
- Content
- List of Figures and Diagrams
- Preface
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- “Everywhere that antinomy of the One and the Many”: The Foundations of A Vision
- The Is and the Ought, the Knower and the Known: An Analysis of the Four Faculties in Yeats's System
- “Spiritual Intellect's Great Work”: A Discussion of the Principles and A Vision's Account of Death The
- Ancient Frames: Classical Philosophy in Yeats's A Vision
- “Timeless and Spaceless”?—Yeats's Search for Models of Interpretation in Post-Enlightenment Philosophy, Contemporary Anthropology and Art History, and the Effects of These Theories on “The Completed Symbol,” “The Soul in Judgment” and “The Great Year of the Ancients”
- W. B. Yeats's A Vision: “Dove or Swan”
- The Thirteenth Cone
- Shifting Sands: Dancing the Horoscope in the Vision Papers
- “Metaphors for Poetry”: Concerning the Poems of A Vision and Certain Plays for Dancers
- A Vision of Ezra Pound
- Reflected Voices, Double Visions
- Yeats's Vision and the Feminine
- Esotericism and Escape
- The Political Occult: Revisiting Fascism, Yeats and A Vision
- Glossary
- Index
Summary
The two versions of A Vision(1925 and 1937) rather neatly coincide with Yeats's interest in authoritarian and proto-fascist policy, emerging most fully in his brief support of the Irish Blueshirts in 1933. In terms of Yeats's work, such an idea was posited by George Orwell in January 1943: “Those who dread the prospect of universal suff rage, popular education, freedom of thought, emancipation of women, will start off with a predilection towards secret cults. There is another link between Fascism and magic in the profound hostility of both to the Christian ethical code.” In fact, a number of commentaries on Yeats's political liaison with right-wing fanaticism have emerged since Conor Cruise O'Brien's “Passion and Cunning” in 1965. Seamus Deane has commented that “Yeats's occult belief passes into his social and political beliefs.” Paul Scott Stansfield describes A Vision as “a deplorable venture” whilst Stephen Spender has suggested: “In the minds of writers who thought that their first obligation in their art was to keep open lines of communication with the dead, Fascism represented order, a return to the past tradition, opposition to Communism and social decadence.” Of course, Yeats's ventures into otherworldly study were frequent and remained a constant throughout his life. In Blood Kindred, W. J. McCormack suggests “underlying these interests and sympathies [in On the Boiler] was an occult philosophy that endorsed the irrational.” Theodor Adorno has also observed that “The appeal of anti-Semitism to insiders is its status as the ‘secret’ which explains everything and is available only to initiates. Like occultism and astrology, anti-Semitism is a paranoid projection of the ‘semi-erudite.’”
The nation and the occult coincide in Nazism in a way that, on the surface at least, recalls Yeats's conception of civilization in A Vision: Anthony Smith notes how “totalitarian controls and an almost ‘magical’ archaic symbolism transform nazism into a pseudomilitary- religious order, far removed from earlier nationalisms,” while in A Vision B, Yeats claims “A civilisation is a struggle to keep self-control.…The loss of control over thought comes towards the end; first a sinking in upon the moral being, then the last surrender, the irrational cry, revelation—the scream of Juno's peacock” (AVB268).
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- W. B. Yeats's 'A Vision'Explications and Contexts, pp. 329 - 343Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2012