A Vision

About this book

A personality moves through twenty-eight phases like the moon. History turns through interlocking spirals, and civilisations follow rhythms of growth and collapse. W. B. Yeats sets out to describe an entire hidden architecture of human life.

Yeats and his wife developed this system through experiences they understood as automatic communication. In the original 1925 edition, lunar phases, gyres and opposing forces appear in symbolic diagrams, alongside artwork by Edmund Dulac. Its elaborate structure helps explain the private system of history, character and destiny that shaped Yeats's later poetry.