In the four years since the publication of our last collaborative volume W. B. Yeats's “A Vision”: Explications and Contexts (Clemson University Digital Press, 2012) a lot has happened in the world of Yeats studies, not least the celebration of Yeats's own sesquicentennial in 2015. After long silence, Yeats Annual finally produced two new volumes, 18 and 19, both in 2013. Charles Armstrong has brought out a monograph balancing biography with textual criticism called Reframing Yeats (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), while Katherine Ebury has compared aspects of Yeats's view of cosmology with relativity theory in her monograph Modernism and Cosmology (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and in an article for Irish Studies Review. Tom Walker's recent monograph Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time (Oxford University Press, 2015) deals extensively with Yeats's relations with and impact upon MacNeice, while Barry Sheils has written a cultural materialist study of Yeats's poetry in an international context, entitled W. B. Yeats and World Literature: The Subject of Poetry (Ashgate, 2015). In 2013, Jared Curtis and Declan Kiely added the final tome to the Cornell Series by editing the manuscript materials for On Baile's Strand. And—perhaps most significantly for this present volume— the fourteenth volume of the Simon and Schuster Collected Works of W. B. Yeats was at last published in 2015, bringing A Vision (1937) and some of its earlier draftings, into edited, annotated, and indexed form for the first time.

However, while the publication of an edited version of A Vision (1937) is of great significance for all the contributors to this present volume, it should be stressed that this book constitutes something of a change of direction from our previous work, as here only two of the seven chapters deal solely or largely with A Vision itself. Our main goal is in fact to center on Yeats's readings and uses of philosophical, religious, and occult texts both in A Vision and outside, from both the Western and Eastern traditions, and furthermore to make use of and promote the manuscript materials which were deposited in the National Library of Ireland only relatively recently, and which are slowly illuminating Yeats's sources and the development of his ideas in his poetry and other texts through patient and devoted scholarship.