Conversing with the dead : William Butler Yeats' supernatural system

Abstract

Upon reading the first page of A.G. Stock's W.B. Yeats: His Poetry and Thought in which he discusses the spirit of Ireland and its supernatural past, which "remains unimpressed by civilization, preoccupied by non-human elemental things"; I found myself recalling having the very same feeling upon a trip to Ireland some three years earlier. This sense of an ancient past and magical atmosphere seemed to me to pervade Yeats' poetry, as indeed Roy Foster's much acclaimed The Apprentice Mage - Vol I (of his influential two volume biography) went on to confirm. This, coupled with an obvious enjoyment of Yeats' work, led me to determine the topic of this dissertation: Yeats's commitment to occult knowledge and "perennial pursuit of sacral power" The dissertation attempts to trace this quest, looking into W.B. Yeats' s spiritualism and occultism from his association with the magical Order of the Golden Dawn through to his 'occult marriage' to George Hyde-Lees. It also focuses on Yeats's A Vision in which he endeavoured to synthesize his enduring interest in mysticism, the occult and the supernatural as collated earlier on in his 'little philosophical book' Per Amica Silentia Lunae; a magical system which his father John Butler Yeats identified as the 'machinery' of his work. The structure of the dissertation permits the first chapter to present a review by means of introduction of Yeats's abiding interest in the occult and arcane in addition to his accumulation of esoteric knowledge. The subsequent chapter takes the early poems as main focus, which Yeats refers to as his coat of embroideries in his famous quote, and their relation to Irish myth and folklore. The following chapter concentrates on Yeats' attempt to penetrate the universal store of images (the great memory and Anima Mundi), with particular reference to The Second Coming; whereas the last chapter focuses on the culmination of his spiritual system, his prose work A Vision, made possible through automatic writing and connection to the spirit world.