2 - Genesis: Making and Remaking A Vision

Summary

Overview

On the afternoon of October 24th 1917, four days after my marriage, my wife surprised me by attempting automatic writing. What came in disjointed sentences, in almost illegible writing, was so exciting, sometimes so profound, that I persuaded her to give an hour or two day after day to the unknown writer, and after some half-dozen such hours offered to spend what remained of life explaining and piecing together those scattered sentences. “No,” was the answer, “we have come to give you metaphors for poetry.” (AVB 8, CW14 7; cf. PEP 12)

Yeats's account of the genesis of A Vision is evidently more or less what happened, though some details may need amplification or qualification. The system was revealed through George Yeats's automatic writing, during sessions where W. B. Yeats would ask questions and her hand would write answers. After some years, there followed sessions of a different kind where the sleeping George would speak and Yeats would note and summarize what she said, sometimes questioning as well. The Yeatses organized the material in notebooks and a card file, piecing the ideas together into a coherent whole, and W. B. Yeats spent over seven years drafting expositions that became the first edition of A Vision.

The earliest drafts are dialogs couched in fictions, as Yeats immediately decided to embed or veil the revelations in a confection involving a Renaissance European and an Arab tribe, with these elements further filtered through characters from stories he had written in the 1890s, Michael Robartes and Owen Aherne. By July 15, 1918, he had written poems based on the material—“The Double Vision of Michael Robartes” and “The Phases of the Moon”—and was also “at the 30th page of my prose dialogue expounding this symbol & there will be 3 dialogues of some 40 pages each, full of my sort of violence & passion” (CLX 3461). Yeats elaborated the fictional framework significantly and many of the earliest and often clearest explanations of fundamental principles come in notes or introductions to poems and plays, usually expressed in terms of these fictions. Their role in the more sustained presentation that he planned gradually diminished as the scope and complexity of the material continued to develop.