Reviews of A Vision B

Yeats�s Vision

A Vision, by W. B. Yeats. New York: The Macmillan Company. 312 pages. $3.

THE FIRST EDITION of �A Vision,� which was privately printed in 1925, has already been discussed in The New Republic. This book is the exposition of a system, rather mystical and astrological than philosophical, which, though it has provided some of the imagery of Yeats�s poems, and contains passages of beautiful writing not without psychological and historic insight, will be of relatively little interest to anybody but spiritualists and theosophists. Yeats has written a new introduction in a vein of playful fantasy rather unlike anything else he has done and reminiscent of Stevenson�s �New Arabian Nights.� He seems today to be a little apprehensive lest he be thought to take his �vision� too literally. His historical periods, he says, he regards as �stylistic arrangements of experience comparable to the cubes in the drawing of Wyndham Lewis and to the ovoids in the sculpture of Brancusi.� In a note at the end, he seems troubled by �socialistic� and �communistic prophecies,� which he tends to think may have something in them but which he has difficulty in accommodating to his system. The volume also includes �A Packet for Ezra Pound,� now first printed in a commercial edition, which throws some light on Pound�s design in his �Cantos� and tells how Yeats�s own conceptions were conveyed to him through the automatic writing of his wife.

EDMUND WILSON