A Vision

Rating:
Summary: A Vision
Review: Readers of this book should be prepared to study. Yeats knowledge of mysticism is deep. He was a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn and had experience in conjuring in the British Museums with Assyrian artifacts. This book is based on a form of astrology, but not of the modern day "what's your sign " superficiality. Again readers must be prepared to do additional study, in the Vedas, the Gita, and Buddhist classics (start with DT Suzuki). This book ranks with Freud for its magnitude . Yeats has not been given the credit he deserves.

Rating:
Summary: A Vision
Review: Readers of this book should be prepared to study. Yeats knowledge of mysticism is deep. He was a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn and had experience in conjuring in the British Museums with Assyrian artifacts. This book is based on a form of astrology, but not of the modern day "what's your sign " superficiality. Again readers must be prepared to do additional study, in the Vedas, the Gita, and Buddhist classics (start with DT Suzuki). This book ranks with Freud for its magnitude . Yeats has not been given the credit he deserves.

Rating:
Summary: Esoteric Yeats
Review: Yeats's "A Vision" gives an esoteric and occult view of the nature of reality and is the product of years of collaboration between the poet, W. B. Yeats, and his wife, George, in automatic writing, followed by years of synthesis and research to work it into book form. The system presented here views everything as subject to a cycle of changes, "gyres", and the stages of the cycle are symbolised by the phases of the Moon. This cycle and its phases apply to human incarnations, the process of the soul's after-lives, and to the broad sweep of history. It is a difficult and coherent system, which has elements in common with other esoteric systems but is also different from them all.
This is the 1925 version of "A Vision", not the more final 1937 version (see the other titles available here, which are all editions of the later one). Large blocks of the 1925 version remained unchanged in the 1937 one -- the descriptions of characters for each phase of the moon and the outline of history -- but the explanations of the processes and mechanisms involved were completely rewritten. If you are coming to "A Vision" for the first time, then you should probably go to the 1937 version first. Also, if your primary interest is the ideas, then the 1937 version is the more considered and mature treatment of the material. This version is, however, invaluable for students of Yeats, especially the later writings, since it represents a stage in his understanding of the material, which informs much of his poetry, as well as his plays and prose. Although it is generally less well organized than the 1937 version, some areas are dealt with more satisfactorily, including the relationship of human and Daimon. The fictional material, with which Yeats prefaces the exposition of the ideas, is also significantly different from the later version.
This edition is a facsimile of one of the 600 copies of this book which Yeats had printed privately in 1925, so it is not a Critical Edition in the normal sense. It does, however, include a very full introduction to the work and its genesis, as well as good notes. George Mills Harper has gone on to publish most of the preparatory material and automatic writing in "The Making of Yeats's 'Vision'" and "Yeats's Vision Papers", but the introduction here is still one of the best summaries of how the book came into being. The notes and index can be slightly thin at times, but are still very useful.

Note: the description of the contents above is inaccurate, it should be:
Editorial Introduction. A Vision: Dedication to Vestigia; Introduction by Owen Aherne; Book 1: What the Caliph Partly Learned; Book 2: What the Caliph Refused to Learn; Book 3: Dove or Swan; Book 4: The Gates of Pluto. Notes; Bibliography; Index.