15 - Reframing A Vision

Summary

Overview

A Vision is a fascinating book and the system that it expounds has a richness and a variety that rewards study. It is also written in a way that gradually yields more meaning as the reader understands more, and the symbolic system opens up with a level of detail and completeness that is impressive. The preparatory work and drafts reveal the hours of thought and labor that Yeats expended on formulating the ideas as well as possible and explaining his subject without too much length.Yeats himself wrote of the need to simplify, but readers have often found that the presentation lacks clarity. If I have mentioned the frustrations and problems of A Vision, it is partly because they stop the book having the readers it deserves and because certain weaknesses in Yeats's approach or style have led to unnecessary misunderstandings or unwillingness to pursue questions raised. Readers are drawn to A Vision by its intimation of symbolic truths that the book too often fails to communicate.

Every interested reader of A Vision is likely to find their own reasons for its value, and different people may well disagree radically on the criteria. It is true that some readers want something that A Vision cannot offer, whether a key to Yeats's poetic symbolism or an astrological key to life. It gives part of both, providing a context for Yeats's symbolism—but his poetry keeps to tradition, history, culture, and the common tongue, not the categories and abstractions of the system—and offering a tool for thinking or understanding experience. To me, A Vision's value lies in the flexibility and strength of its symbol system and in its fundamental attitude to life, which is modern as well as ancient. The system offers a myth that acknowledges its myth, and has a profound humanism that is based on genuine humanity rather than abstract doctrine.

In Further Detail

“There are many symbolisms and none exactly resembles mine”

In his review of A Vision A, George Russell remarked on how “the metaphysical structure [Yeats] rears is coherent, and it fits into its parts with the precision of Chinese puzzle boxes into each other.” For Yeats the consistency of what emerged from the automatic script was confirmation of the validity of the system, and, despite the pruning and revision required to make the fragments yield that coherence, the symbol system is remarkably unified.