Yeats, Philosophy, and the Occult is a collection of essays examining the thought of the Irish poet W. B. Yeats and particularly his philosophical reading and explorations of older systems of thought, where philosophy, mysticism, and the supernatural blend. It opens with a broad survey of the current state of Yeats scholarship, which also includes an examination of Yeats's poetic practice through a manuscript of the original core of a poem that became a work of philosophical thought and occult lore, "The Phases of the Moon." The following essay examines an area where spiritualism, eugenic theory, and criminology cross paths in the writings of Cesare Lombroso, and Yeats's response to his work. The third paper considers Yeats's debts to the East, especially Buddhist and Hindu thought, while the fourth looks at his ideas about the dream-state, the nature of reality, and contact with the dead. The fifth essay explores Yeats's understanding of the concept of the Great Year from classical astronomy and philosophy, and its role in the system of his work A Vision, and the sixth paper studies that work's theory of "contemporaneous periods" affecting each other across history in the light of Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West. The seventh essay evaluates Yeats's reading of Berkeley and his critics' appreciation (or lack of it) of how he responds to Berkeley's idealism. The book as a whole explores how Yeats's mind and thought relate to his poetry, drama, and prose, and how his reading informs all of them.

About the Author
Matthew Gibson is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Macau. He is the author of 'Yeats, Coleridge and the Romantic Sage' (Macmillan, 2000) and 'Dracula and the Eastern Question: British and French Vampire Narratives of the Nineteenth Century Near East' (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). He is presently completing a new monograph for the University of Wales Press, called 'Nineteenth Century European Gothic: Vampires, Doubles and the French Revolution'. Neil Mann works as an editor, translator, and teacher, and as an independent scholar, specializing in the works of W. B. Yeats, particularly his esoteric interests and A Vision. He is one of the readers who is simultaneously frustrated and fascinated by A Vision and the system that W. B. Yeats and his wife, George, elaborated through years of occult experiment and personal research. In 2002, he created the website YeatsVision.com as a resource for those seeking to understand this work better, and this book is the result of some forty years of engagement with A Vision, Yeats's work as a whole, and the background of nineteenth-century spirituality.

Reviews
Reviews 'The book concludes with two appendices... consolidating the book's position at the cutting edge of the 'archival turn' in Yeats studies and new modernist studies more generally.'
The Year's Work in English Studies



Book Information
ISBN 9781800859630
Author Matthew Gibson
Format Paperback
Page Count 237
Imprint Liverpool University Press
Publisher Liverpool University Press