W. B. Yeats’s A Vision (1925)
The Historical Cones in A Vision
The Historical Cones extends the book’s opposing figures into a speculative arrangement of historical time. The diagram distinguishes dates AD from bracketed phase numbers, sets them on overlapping cones and names Creative Mind, Mask, Body of Fate and Will on a horizontal section. Its note identifies a section related to the author’s present moment, including a date of 1927. Read in the edition dated 1925, that temporal frame belongs to the book’s own historical scheme. It is not an updated chart of the present day or evidence that history follows an established geometrical law.
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In the sources
Dates and phases are different markings
DocumentedThe note above the diagram distinguishes bracketed phase numbers from dates AD.
The image develops an earlier construction
DocumentedThe opposing-cone explanation supplies the geometrical language used again in the historical diagram.
Context & interpretation
This entry follows the complete edition of A Vision dated 1925 held in the Reader. It does not import revisions from the substantially different 1937 version. The terminology describes Yeats’s literary and esoteric model; references to types, faculties, phases or history are attributed to that model rather than presented as established psychology, astronomy or historical laws.
Original passages
Source 1
A Vision
The numbers in brackets refer to phasesOpen this page in the book
Passage & edition details
Location recorded at citation review: Full-page diagram headed The Historical Cones
Actual checksum-verified active Reader scan inspected. Short quotation transcribed from the scan; line breaks and spacing normalised.
- Edition
- IMJ-0374-E001
- Reader page
- IMJ-0374-E001-P0196
- Original scan leaf
- 204
- Recorded leaf number
- 204
- Current Reader position
- 197
- Reader verification
- Matches the reviewed Reader
Source 2
A Vision
the first gyre met with another and opposing gyreOpen this page in the book
Passage & edition details
Location recorded at citation review: Book II, opposing-cone diagram and explanation, printed p. 130
Actual checksum-verified active Reader scan inspected. Short quotation transcribed from the scan; line breaks and spacing normalised.
- Edition
- IMJ-0374-E001
- Reader page
- IMJ-0374-E001-P0148
- Original scan leaf
- 155
- Recorded leaf number
- 155
- Current Reader position
- 149
- Reader verification
- Matches the reviewed Reader
Illustrations
Continue exploring
Gyres in A Vision
Expanding and contracting figures through which Yeats represents opposed tendencies and their movement.
Shared illustrationThe Four Faculties in A Vision
Will, Mask, Creative Mind and Body of Fate: the four interacting faculties in Yeats’s 1925 model.
Same subject and traditionThe Great Wheel in A Vision
The circular diagram through which Yeats organises twenty-eight phases, contrasting tendencies and human types.