The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Volume XIII: A Vision: The Original 1925 Version (The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats)

The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume XIII: A Vision is part of a fourteen-volume series under the general editorship of eminent Yeats scholar George Bornstein and formerly the late Richard J. Finneran and George Mills Harper. One of the strangest works of literary modernism, A Vision is Yeats's greatest occult work. Edited by Yeats scholars Catherine E. Paul and Margaret Mills Harper, the volume presents the "system" of philosophy, psychology, history, and the life of the soul that Yeats and his wife George (née Hyde Lees) received and created by means of mediumistic experiments from 1917 through the early 1920s. Yeats obsessively revised the book, and the revised 1937 version is much more widely available than its predecessor. The original 1925 version of A Vision , poetic, unpolished, masked in fiction, and close to the excitement of the automatic writing that the Yeatses believed to be its supernatural origin, is presented here in a scholarly edition for the first time. The text, minimally corrected to retain the sense of the original, is extensively annotated, with particular attention paid to the relationship between the published book and its complex genetic materials. Indispensable to an understanding of the poet's late work and entrancing on its own merit, A Vision aims to be, all at once, a work of theoretical history, an esoteric philosophy, an aesthetic symbology, a psychological schema, and a sacred book. It is as difficult as it is essential reading for any student of Yeats. "The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Volume XIII: A Vision is part of a fourteen-volume series under the general editorship of eminent Yeats scholar George Bornstein and formerly the late Richard J. Finneran and George Mills Harper. One of the strangest works of literary modernism, A Vision is Yeats's greatest occult work. Edited by Yeats scholars Catherine E. Paul and Margaret Mills Harper, the volume presents the "system" of philosophy, psychology, history, and the life of the soul that Yeats and his wife George (nee Hyde Lees) received and created by means of mediumistic experiments from 1917 through the early 1920s. Yeats obsessively revised the book, and the revised 1937 version is much more widely available than its predecessor. The original 1925 version of A Vision, poetic, unpolished, masked in fiction, and close to the excitement of the automatic writing that the Yeatses believed to be its supernatural origin, is presented here in a scholarly edition for the first time. The text, minimally corrected to retain the sense of the original, is extensively annotated, with particular attention paid to the relationship between the published book and its complex genetic materials. Indispensable to an understanding of the poet's late work and entrancing on its own merit, A Vision aims to be, all at once, a work of theoretical history, an esoteric philosophy, an aesthetic symbology, a psychological schema, and a sacred book. It is as difficult as it is essential reading for any student of Yeats."--Publisher's website V. 1. The Poems / Edited By Richard J. Finneran -- V. 2. The Plays / Edited By David R. Clark And Rosalind E. Clark -- V. 3. Autobiographies / Edited By William H. O'donnell And Douglas N. Archibald -- V. 4. Early Essays / Edited By George Bornstein And Richard J. Finneran -- V. 5. Later Essays / Edited By William H. O'donnell -- V. 6. Prefaces And Introductions / Edited By William H. O'donnell -- V. 7. Letters To The New Island / Edited By George Bornstein And Hugh Witemeyer -- V. 8. The Irish Dramatic Movement / Edited By Mary Fitzgerald And Richard J. Finneran -- V. 9. Early Articles And Reviews / Edited By John P. Frayne And Madeleine Marchaterre -- V. 10. Later Articles And Reviews / Edited By Colton Johnson -- V. 12. John Sherman And Dhoya / Edited By Richard J. Finneran -- V. 13. A Vision (1925) /edited By Catherine E. Paul And Margaret Mills Harper. Richard J. Finneran And George Mills Harper, General Editors. General Editors Vary. Vol. 2-5, 8-9, 13 Have Imprint: New York : Scribner. Includes Bibliographical References And Indexes.