Yesterday, 02:06 PM
The Mercurial Yeats: esoteric alchemy in the late poetry
By Morgan Azali
"This BA (Hons) thesis conducts an analysis of the late poetry of W.B. Yeats with consideration of the fact that he was, by that time, an adept in the Golden Dawn tradition of magic and largely influenced by its principles. The aim of this thesis is to highlight how the essence of Mercurius, the multi-faceted arcanumof alchemy, is present throughout the late poetry of W.B. Yeats. Through an enquiry into the ways that Yeats’s interests in the Western Esoteric Tradition filtered into his creative output, multiple themes of unity, transmutation, and transcendence began to emerge. This thesis provides a brief history of hermeticism and the ways that it intersects with Yeats’s biography before considering 'A Vision' as an attempt by his wife to alchemise Yeats’s desires for other women and the subsequent ritual enactment of this process in the poetry of 'The Tower' and 'The Winding Stair.' By applying Jungian psychoanalytical concepts of the unconscious, this thesis aims to arrive at a hermeneutic understanding of Yeats’s role within the modernist era as a balancing force, raising the 'antithetical' through the 'primary' – the two terms that he uses to describe the geometrical, cyclic system handed to him by what he believed to be spiritual intelligences in 'A Vision'."
Full text:
https://www.academia.edu/91247376/The_Me...ate_poetry
By Morgan Azali
"This BA (Hons) thesis conducts an analysis of the late poetry of W.B. Yeats with consideration of the fact that he was, by that time, an adept in the Golden Dawn tradition of magic and largely influenced by its principles. The aim of this thesis is to highlight how the essence of Mercurius, the multi-faceted arcanumof alchemy, is present throughout the late poetry of W.B. Yeats. Through an enquiry into the ways that Yeats’s interests in the Western Esoteric Tradition filtered into his creative output, multiple themes of unity, transmutation, and transcendence began to emerge. This thesis provides a brief history of hermeticism and the ways that it intersects with Yeats’s biography before considering 'A Vision' as an attempt by his wife to alchemise Yeats’s desires for other women and the subsequent ritual enactment of this process in the poetry of 'The Tower' and 'The Winding Stair.' By applying Jungian psychoanalytical concepts of the unconscious, this thesis aims to arrive at a hermeneutic understanding of Yeats’s role within the modernist era as a balancing force, raising the 'antithetical' through the 'primary' – the two terms that he uses to describe the geometrical, cyclic system handed to him by what he believed to be spiritual intelligences in 'A Vision'."
Full text:
https://www.academia.edu/91247376/The_Me...ate_poetry