Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of Figures and Table
- List of Abbreviations
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 “Something Intended, Complete”: Major Work on Yeats Past, Present, and Yet to Come
- 2 Ghost, Medium, Criminal, Genius: Lombrosian Types in Yeats's Art and Philosophy
- 3 “Born Anew”: W. B. Yeats's “Eastern” Turn in the 1930s
- 4 W. B. Yeats, Dream, Vision, and the Dead
- 5 Yeats, the Great Year, and Pierre Duhem
- 6 The Morphological Interaction of the Four Faculties in the Historical System of W. B. Yeats's A Vision
- 7 Yeats and Abstraction: From Berkeley to Zen
- I Annotations in the Writings of Walter Savage Landor in the Yeatses' Library
- II Yeats's Notes on Leo Frobenius's The Voice of Africa (1913)
- Index
7 - Yeats and Abstraction: From Berkeley to Zen
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of Figures and Table
- List of Abbreviations
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 “Something Intended, Complete”: Major Work on Yeats Past, Present, and Yet to Come
- 2 Ghost, Medium, Criminal, Genius: Lombrosian Types in Yeats's Art and Philosophy
- 3 “Born Anew”: W. B. Yeats's “Eastern” Turn in the 1930s
- 4 W. B. Yeats, Dream, Vision, and the Dead
- 5 Yeats, the Great Year, and Pierre Duhem
- 6 The Morphological Interaction of the Four Faculties in the Historical System of W. B. Yeats's A Vision
- 7 Yeats and Abstraction: From Berkeley to Zen
- I Annotations in the Writings of Walter Savage Landor in the Yeatses' Library
- II Yeats's Notes on Leo Frobenius's The Voice of Africa (1913)
- Index
Summary
My imagination was for a time haunted by figures that, muttering “The great systems,” held out to me the sundried skeletons of birds, and it seemed to me that this image was meant to turn my thoughts to the living bird. That bird signifies truth when it eats, evacuates, builds its nest, engenders, feeds its young; do not all intelligible truths lie in its passage from egg to dust? (CW14 158; AVB 214).
It seems to me that I have found what I wanted. When I try to put all into a phrase I say, “Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.” I must embody it in the completion of my life. The abstract is not life and everywhere draws out its contradictions. You can refute Hegel but not the Saint or the Song of Sixpence…. (CL InteLex 7362; L 922)
As a poet who thought in concrete terms, Yeats was unhappy when he found himself amongst abstract things; yet, despite his natural inclination, he knew he needed abstraction to set his experience in order (CW13104; AVA 129). A Vision is, of course, Yeats's most sustained abstraction, but, once A Vision was published, he also engaged in extended study of several major philosophers. Foremost of these was George Berkeley.
Some Yeats scholars have been less than kind about their subject's ability to comprehend philosophy in general and Berkeley in particular. W. J. Mc Cormack is severe on Yeats in most matters, and takes particular delight in using an unsourced statement to the effect that the eminent Berkeley scholar A. A. Luce, being “[a]n astringent personality, … had no time for Yeats as an amateur philosopher at best and a very questionable protestant.” It is not my intention here or elsewhere to devote much time to Yeats's Protestantism or otherwise, but I do wish to reiterate what Donald Torchiana had said about Luce on Yeats's philosophizing well before Mc Cormack took up the case. I shall then continue with other matters, which were studiously avoided by Mc Cormack in his rush to judgment.
Mc Cormack avers that “The advance by scholarship of Berkeley's claims to the modern reader's attention occurred in stated rejection of the Yeatsian exposition” (WIE4).
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- Yeats, Philosophy, and the Occult , pp. 251 - 288Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2016