A Vision

A Vision is the central prose work by the Irish poet W. B. Yeats, presented as a system dictated by spirits through the automatic writing of his wife Georgie Hyde-Lees, beginning in 1917. The book lays out a 28-phase lunar typology of personality, a doctrine of historical gyres — interlocking expanding and contracting cones — and an esoteric metaphysics of reincarnation and the soul's journey between lives. The 1925 private edition was substantially revised for the 1937 Macmillan edition, which is the version most readers encounter.

The system Yeats constructed underpins much of his mature poetry. The opening section, "A Packet for Ezra Pound," describes the Rapallo setting in which the book took shape and frames the whole as a tool for understanding rather than a creed to be believed. Yeats himself remained ambivalent about whether the communications were literal or "stylistic arrangements of experience." The four Books — "What the Caliph Partly Learned," "What the Caliph Refused to Learn," "Dove or Swan," and "The Gates of Pluto" — cover personality typology, the history of civilisations as cyclical gyres, and the soul's afterlife states.

Contents

Reception

*A Vision* is the central prose text for understanding Yeats's mature poetics — "The Second Coming," "Sailing to Byzantium," "Byzantium," and the Crazy Jane poems all depend on its symbolic system — and is studied closely in literary criticism (Helen Vendler, A. Norman Jeffares, Margaret Mills Harper's *Wisdom of Two*). As an occult document it has been received variably: Yeats himself was ambivalent about whether to treat the system as literal spirit-communication or "stylistic arrangements of experience," and most non-Yeatsian esotericists treat the work as idiosyncratic rather than tradition-rooted. The 1925 and 1937 editions diverge enough that contemporary scholarship treats them as separate works; Cornell University Press has published critical editions of both.

Frequently asked

What is A Vision about?

A Vision is W. B. Yeats's systematic account of a symbolic framework he and his wife Georgie Hyde-Lees developed through automatic writing beginning in 1917. It presents a 28-phase lunar typology of human personality, a theory of history as interlocking gyres, and a metaphysics of the soul's journey between lives.

What are "gyres" in Yeats's A Vision?

Gyres are Yeats's term for interlocking expanding and contracting cones that represent the movement of history and individual life. As one gyre reaches its widest point, the other begins to expand from its narrowest — a model of cyclical opposition that Yeats applied to civilisations (traced in the section "Dove or Swan") and to individual temperament.

How does A Vision relate to Yeats's poetry?

The gyre and lunar-phase imagery runs directly through his late poems. "The Second Coming" turns on the widening gyre and the cyclical end of an era; "Sailing to Byzantium" and "Byzantium" draw on the Soul in Judgment passages; the Crazy Jane poems and "Leda and the Swan" relate to phases of the moon and historical cycles described in A Vision.