Reviews of A Vision B

The review takes a number of Irish books together, reviewing Seventy Years Young: Memories of Elizabeth, Countess of Fingall, told to Pamela Hinkson, A Memoir of �, George William Russell, by John Eglinton, and The Living Torch, essays of AE, edited by Monk Gibbon, before coming to A Vision.

from BOOKS OF THE DAY

    One of ƒs closest friends—a famous living poet—has published a revised and amplified version of a book setting forth the principles, doctrines, and experiences behind his inspiration—namely, �A VISION,� By W. B. Yeats. With Portrait by Augustus John (Macmillan; 15s.). This abstruse work, with its intricate symbolism and esoteric philosophy, baffles me, but I am consoled to find that � himself was similarly affected. In a review of it (included in �The Living Torch�) he says: �I have written round and round this extraordinary book, unable in a brief space to give the slightest idea of its packed pages. . . .  It may come to be regarded as the greatest of Yeats� works. It is conceivable also that it may be regarded as his greatest erring from the way of his natural genius.�

    �, however, extracts a little fun even from such grave material. After indicating Yeats�s system of cycles and phases, �all of a bewildering complexity,� he remarks (in a passage recalling the circles of Dante�s �Inferno�): �When he - Yeats - illustrates these phases of human life by portraits of men and women, dead and living, typical of the phase, I suspect the author to be animated . . . by an impish humour. . . .  I am a little uncomfortable with some of my fellow prisoners in phase twenty-five. I welcome George Herbert, but am startled to find myself along with Calvin, Luther and Cardinal Newman.� In another essay given in �The Living Torch,� � pays a high tribute to his poet-friend. �Yeats,� he affirms, �has made the name of his country shine in imagination to the rest of the world a hundred times more than any of the political notorieties. . . .  It was by the literary movement of which Yeats was the foremost figure that Ireland for the first time for long centuries came to any high international repute.�

    Just as � was disconcerted by Yeats� visionary philosophy, so Yeats himself appears puzzled by another poet�s magnum opus, continued in �THE FIFTH DECAD OF CANTOS,� By Ezra Pound (Faber; 6s.). In �A Vision,� Mr. Yeats writes of �Ezra Pound, whose art is the opposite of mine, whose criticism commends what I most condemn, a man with whom I should quarrel more than with anyone else if we were not united by affection.�