Illusion

Author: Yeats
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-11-01
Features: William Butler Yeats was a renowned modern English lyric poet and playwright, the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923, and one of the leaders of the Irish Literary Revival at the turn of the 20th century. He was a major representative of late Symbolist poetry in Britain and had a significant influence on the development of modern British poetry. A Vision describes the development of humanity and history through poetic wisdom and imagination. This description has a certain continuity with the value of ancient wisdom and symbolism. The entire book is primarily structured around twenty-eight lunar phases, each phase representing different historical periods, life stages, subjective degrees, and personality types. Each phase has its own "will," "body of destiny," "creative mind," and "mask," as well as its own representative figures. Yeats believed that history develops in a spiral, expanding outward from the apex, and that when the spiral reaches its maximum, it marks the end of an era. A Vision can also be seen as an expression of the latent structure of Yeats's poetry. It greatly enriches and deepens Yeats's perception of human complex experiences, giving his poetry an almost unsurpassable—and yet irresistible—power.