The Making of Yeat's A Vision: A Study of the Automatic Script, Vol. 1 and Vol 2

According to Yeats, his wife surprised him on 24 October 1917, four days after their marriage, “by attempting automatic writing.” Excited, he offered to spend the remainder of his life organizing and explaining the “scattered sentences.” Over a period of approximately 30 months they collaborated in 450 sittings, he asking questions, she responding to fill a total of more than 3,600 pages.

Quoting copiously from the Script, Harper has traced in two volumes these incredible experiments day by day as the Yeatses moved about England, Ireland, and America. He has also cited hundreds of parallel explanatory passages from many workbooks, notebooks, and the concordance arranged like a card index in which Yeats codified the System he projected in A Vision and numerous poems and plays. Harper also has examined the extensive personal revelations that were excluded from A Vision and carefully concealed in many passages of “personal Script.” As Professor Harper demonstrates, Yeats had these often oblique, highly allusive passages in mind when he admitted “To Vestigia” that he had “not even dealt with the whole of my subject, perhaps not even with what is most important, writing nothing about the Beatific Vision, little of sexual love.”

George Mills Harper is R. O. Lawton Distinguished Professor at Florida State University. He has lectured widely on Yeats in America and in Europe and has written several books on the Irish poet.