Abstract

The goal of this study is a critical analysis of W. B. Yeats's metaphysical system of ethics as it is developed in his visionary and apocalyptic writings. These writings include the great unpublished mass of his Automatic Script, the unpublished Sleep and Dream Notebooks, and the 1925 version of A Vision. ;A Vision, with its attendant body of visionary materials, is the product of one of the most remarkable sustained psychical experiments in our time. Between October 1917, when W. B. Yeats married Georgie Hyde-Lees, and April 1925, when the first version of A Vision was complete, Yeats and his wife conducted almost daily a series of psychic experiments which included automatic writing and sleep and dream trances. The automatic writing experiments generally took on a question-answer format, with Yeats as the inquirer and George as the medium or interpreter for the response, which they insisted was transmitted through her from the spirit world. The resulting notebooks , along with the Sleep and Dream Notebooks, are a record of the Yeats's dialogue with the spirit world. The intent of this study is to examine Yeats's involvement in the early twentieth-century revolution in human consciousness through an analysis of the ethical concepts which can be derived from his visionary and apocalyptic writings, particularly the development of those theories over the course of his psychic experiments with George. ;Yeats's labor led him to posit the necessity of developing a "Vision of Evil" for any further progression of the soul, and to locate the place of value at the level of image in the unconscious. His approach to the problem of evil in the Script was thus both inherited and radically original, supporting the notion that in our everyday experiences we not only find value but that we make it, and effecting a belief towards an ideal end which lies outside the mere fact of existence