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 Thirteenth Cone
- 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
Although A Vision addresses a whole range of human attitudes towards God, there is little or no sense of the deity existing within or behind the system. God overshadows a significant part of the system, in particular as the specific interest of those in the last quarter of incarnations, and Yeats pays constant attention to humanity's relationships with God, through the wheel's spectrum of temperaments and over the spans of historical time, including belief and skepticism, love and hatred, struggle against and unity with God. Human ideas of God are present throughout, as is an emphasis on the supernatural and spiritual worlds that lie beyond the mundane, but the only figure that shows divine attributes is “the phaseless sphere” (AVB193), in particular in its secondary guise as the “Thirteenth Cycle or Thirteenth Cone” (AVB210).
This strange geometric abstraction hovers indistinctly at the margins of the system and, from the ways it is referred to in A Vision B, takes on a variety of qualities. It has some characteristics of place for “I shall have much to say of the sphere as the final place of rest” (AVB69) and “Within it live all souls that have been set free and every Daimon and Ghostly Self” (AVB210); of a state or attribute, since “the Thirteenth Cone or cycle… is in every man and called by every man his freedom” (AVB302); of an abstraction and a being, as “The Thirteenth Cone is a sphere because sufficient to itself; but as seen by man it is a cone. It becomes even conscious of itself as so seen” (AVB240) or as “the reflection or messenger of the final deliverance” (AVB210); of deity, for “it can do all things and knows all things” (AVB302); even, possibly, of “Shelley's Demogorgon—eternity” (AVB211). These attributes are not impossible to reconcile but Yeats deliberately makes no eff ort to do so and leaves his readers questioning.
As a consequence few elements of A Vision have given readers and commentators as many problems.
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- Information
- W. B. Yeats's 'A Vision'Explications and Contexts, pp. 159 - 193Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2012