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
Yeats's Vision and the Feminine
- 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
W. B. Yeats insisted that “the mystical life is the centre of all that I do & all that I think & all that I write” (CL1303). This essay will explore what that mystical life entails, in terms of Yeats's beliefs, values, and attitudes, as they pertain to issues of gender, and more specifically, Yeats's valorization of the feminine. I have argued elsewhere that A Vision(1937) diminishes the importance of gender compared to its antecedents: the automatic script and A Vision(1925), a position also argued by Margaret Mills Harper and Elizabeth Butler Cullingford. With that diminution in mind, we can ask the following questions: given that Yeats's perception of “a universal masculine & feminine in soul” (YVP1109) shaped the core of his theosophy, what did his occlusion of gender accomplish (or attempt to accomplish) in the second edition of A Vision? Are his more strategic representations and uses of gender true to his vision of the feminine, and more fundamentally, how is gender infused into his symbolic system?
Yeats's View of the Feminine
In the years before his marriage, Yeats associated the female with magic and mystery, since he believed that women were naturally in harmony with nature and her secrets—closer to the body, a privileged position indeed since Yeats believed that “all power is from the body,” at least in Western culture, and that “religion and magic insist on power and therefore on body” (CW3356; Au481). Moreover, the body of a woman is like the words of a poet: “subtle… complex…full of mysterious life” (“The Symbolism of Poetry,” CW4120; E&I164).
Yeats claimed women are also sensitive to the bond between natural and supernatural, which “are knit together” (CW5210; E&I518). In fact, Yeats envies the way women are in tune with the presence of spirits. When it comes to embracing and understanding ancient lore, “women come more easily than men to that wisdom,” Yeats laments (“The Queen and the Fool,” Myth115; M200577). There is a kind of madness to such wisdom, he goes on to acknowledge.
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- Information
- W. B. Yeats's 'A Vision'Explications and Contexts, pp. 291 - 306Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2012