A Vision 2: A Packet for Ezra Pound

By the late 1930s William Butler Yeats was an old man. He celebrated his seventieth birthday in 1935; his health, never robust, became increasingly fragile as the 1930s wore on. Gone were the days when he went on lecture tours across the English-speaking world, sleeping on trains to save expenses while giving one lecture or poetry reading after another for weeks on end. The rain and snow that sweep in from the North Atlantic and make Irish winters so bitter were more than his failing health could handle, and since he was no longer a poor man, he had alternatives. That was what brought him to Rapallo.

You can find Rapallo on a map in the northwestern part of Italy, on the shores of the Mediterranean, due north of the island of Corsica. Now as in Yeats’s time, it’s not a big resort town, but attractive scenery, a mellow climate, and modest expenses compared to more popular venues have made it a magnet for intellectuals and creative artists since the 19th century. Among its habitués were composer Jean Sibelius, painter (and occultist) Wassily Kandinsky, and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote his magnum opus Thus Spake Zarathustra while staying there. In the 1930s it was also the home of American poet and general intellectual gadfly Ezra Pound, long one of Yeats’s close friends.

That made it entirely in character for Yeats to begin the second edition of A Vision with an atmospheric introduction about Rapallo, and to go on from there to a summary of the origin story of A Vision and a little letter to Pound. He published it as a short book in 1929, eight years before the new edition saw print. It’s a lovely atmospheric piece—and if you’re left thinking that this is all there is to it, Yeats has suckered you.

Let me pass on one simple trick that old-fashioned occultists know by heart but literary critics have apparently never noticed: it’s important to pay attention to the number of sections, chapters, or volumes in any work written by an occultist from Eliphas Lévi onward. Lévi famously divided each of the two volumes of his pathbreaking occult textbook Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic) into 22 chapters, corresponding to the 22 trump cards of the tarot deck. Lots of people after his time picked up the same habit, and not all of them were explicit about it. Quite the contrary, it became a wink-and-nod by which occult writers clued in those who knew enough to pay attention.

Thus J.-K. Huysmans divided his brilliant novel of fashionable Parisian Satanism, La-Bàs, into 22 chapters. If you know the meanings of the tarot trumps, furthermore, you’ll see the figure on each card appear in the chapter of the same number: a magician in the first chapter, a high priestess in the second, and so on through the sequence. Joséphin Péladan did the same thing, though on a typically more grandiose scale, by writing 22 novels, each of which focuses, you guessed it, on a character who corresponds exactly to the main figure on the corresponding tarot trump. There are other examples, and I’ve yet to see a literary critic mention any of them.

Now take a moment to count the sections of the three parts of “A Packet for Ezra Pound.” I’ll count them with you: five sections in “Rapallo,” fifteen sections in “Introduction to ‘A Vision’,” and two sections in “To Ezra Pound.” Ahem. Yes, Yeats just winked at you.

What makes this even more interesting that it would otherwise be is that there were two different standard orders for the 22 trumps in the occult community of Yeats’s time. There was the order that Lévi used, which began with the Magician and put the Fool between the last two cards, Judgment and the World. Then there was the order used by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and its successor groups, which moved the Fool to the head of the line.

You might expect that Yeats would have used the Golden Dawn sequence in this essay, but he didn’t; the Golden Dawn sequence was still mostly secret in his time, though Aleister Crowley had splashed it around his writings by then, and Yeats would have considered himself bound by his initiatory oaths not to reveal it. The first section of “Rapallo” accordingly begins with a lightly disguised evocation of the four elements, the central theme of Trump I, the Magician, in Lévi’s book and the older occult tarot generally; the second focuses on the duality and complementarity between Yeats and Pound, corresponding to Trump II, the High Priestess; the sequence goes straight on from there, making more or less obvious references to each card in order, until it winds up with the Fool and the World in “To Ezra Pound.”

What makes all this especially charming is that none of it is forced or obtrusive. Here as elsewhere in our text, Yeats is at the peak of his powers as a prose stylist and essayist. Thus it’s entirely possible to read “A Packet for Ezra Pound” as nothing more than a lengthy introduction to A Vision, and enjoy it on those terms. For those who were attentive to occult symbolism, though, it had a twofold message. The first and more obvious part of that message was simply a heads-up to the reader to expect occultism, and plenty of it, in the pages to come. The second and less obvious part was a warning that not all the occult content would be obvious. Keep both these in mind and you’ll get more out of the journey ahead.

With this in mind, let’s take a look at this lengthy introduction with its occult substructure, and see what else we can extract from it. The first thing to look for is the pervasive presence of binary oppositions all through these 22 sections. A Vision, as later posts in this sequence will discuss at length, is structured throughout by the relationship between two pairs of contraries: Will and Mask, Creative Mind and Body of Fate.

The Will is exactly what the word implies, the active, desiring, motivating part of whatever being is under discussion, whether this is an individual, a social or political movement, an age of history, or anything else. What it seeks is the Mask, which is always the opposite of the Will, the sum total of those things absent from the Will that would make the Will complete. The Creative Mind is the perceptive part of the being under discussion, its intellect and understanding; what it perceives is its Body of Fate, the world of circumstances that surround it, and this latter is the opposite and complement of the Creative Mind, the sum total of those things not part of the Creative Mind that the Creative Mind strives to know. The Will seeks to embrace its Mask, the Creative Mind seeks to understand its Body of Fate, and each of these is a quest for its own opposite, the attempt by a light to unite with its own shadow.

Thus it’s not by chance that Yeats starts out the second section of “Rapallo” with the creative opposition between his poetry and criticism and that of his good friend and poetic rival Ezra Pound. Yeats does not exaggerate the difference; it’s hard to think off hand of two early twentieth century poets writing in English whose work is more sharply opposed than Pound and Yeats. The two belonged to different generations—Yeats was born in 1865, Pound in 1885—and their divergent poetic visions are partly a function of their different positions in the slow unraveling of the English-language poetic tradition that reached its nadir with Allen Ginsberg and his ilk.

Yet there’s more to it than that, of course. Yeats was Irish; he was born in a suburb of crowded Dublin but moved to rural Sligo in infancy, and his father was a successful painter who kept in touch with most of the cultural movements of the day. Pound was American; he was born in a tiny settlement in the mountains of Idaho when that was still a territory rather than a state, but moved to New York City in infancy, and his father worked in lumber mills and gold assay offices. Yeats was an occultist, while Pound rolled his eyes at occultism. The fact that the two men occupied opposite ends of the literary spectrum of their day amplified the opposition in their biographies, and their friendship thus made a fine metaphor for the mutual conflict and compensation of Will and Mask, Creative Mind and Body of Fate.

Everything else Yeats mentions in “Rapallo” similarly echoes some aspect of the book to come. The intricate structure of Pound’s Cantos, outlined in section II, hints at the complexities of the 28 phases of the Moon that provide the basic structure of A Vision. So do the quarrelsome and varied cats that Pound feeds in section III, and there’s another contrariety: does Pound like the cats, or not? Notice a second opposition in this same section, between Pound and Yeats’s unnamed friend—this is Lady Augusta Gregory, one of the great pillars of the Irish literary revival and a major influence on Yeats; she was still alive when “A Packet for Ezra Pound” was published in 1929, though she died before the second edition of A Vision saw print.

Note also the wry political satire in section III, which will be repeated in “To Ezra Pound.” By the time Yeats wrote this, his uncritical admiration for the nationalist revolutionaries he knew in his youth had been tempered by decades of bitter experience. He had seen Ireland win its independence in a brutal revolutionary conflict and then plunge straight into civil war. His two terms in the Senate of the Irish Free State doubtless also did much to rid him of any lingering idealism toward the political process, and put an edge on his wry fantasy of organizing the cats in order to exploit them, “and like good politicians sell our charity for power.” His late poetry on the subject is even more harsh. Here’s his “The Great Day” from 1938:

Hurrah for revolution and more cannon-shot!
A beggar upon horseback lashes a beggar on foot.
Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again!
The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on.

Sections IV and V of “Rapallo” introduces another theme that will be developed at great length in the body of A Vision, the opposition between primary and antithetical approaches to the world. The primary is rooted in the senses, and has to do with the Creative Mind and the Body of Fate, while the antithetical is rooted in the imagination, and has to do with the Will and the Mask. The English tourists whose red-blooded faith comes in for Yeats’s mockery offer a fine first glimpse of what he will call the primary tincture, while Yeats’s own more reflective but more anemic faith is a first sketch of the antithetical tincture. (If you’re not sure how to parse all this, don’t worry about it—we’ll be covering the tinctures in vast detail as the discussion proceeds.)

With the next part of Yeats’s notional packet, “Introduction to ‘A Vision’,” the play of opposites goes on, though here he also provides a tolerably detailed summary of the process by which A Vision came into being. Yeats included among his other occult interests a lifelong fascination with psychic phenomena, which he pursued with characteristic energy as an active member of the Society for Psychical Research. That background shows clearly in these fifteen sections: Yeats is concerned to note down the details of the process and to recount the various odd and eerie events—synchronicities, as his contemporary C.G. Jung called them—that surrounded the communications his wife brought through.

This section also takes pains to present Yeats as a baffled but objective observer who does not take the metaphysical dimensions of the system of A Vision any more seriously than he has to. This is one of the places where it’s most important to keep in mind the importance of masks in Yeats’s thought. I’ll be frank here: when Yeats insists that he thinks of the system purely as an aesthetic structure, a set of “metaphors for poetry” with no objective validity, I don’t believe him.

More precisely, I only half-believe him. It was precisely his point in this book and elsewhere in his work that no point of view is complete, that every belief has to be balanced against its utter opposite if it is to have any chance of embracing truth. Here also, curiously enough, he and C.G. Jung are speaking the same language; Jung’s essay “On Psychic Energy,” first published in 1928, makes the same point, arguing that only an “antinomian postulate” that embraces opposed and mutually irreconcilable visions can express the truth about the psyche.

Here again, though, the mask Yeats dons is another opportunity to prefigure the dance of contraries in A Vision. The point of the system, he claims, is “to hold in a single thought reality and justice”: the first of these two principles belongs to the primary tincture, the second to the antithetical. Yeats and his wife form another pair of contraries, as do the Communicators and the Frustrators, the two swarms of spirits who contended with each other in the process of communication. The records of the communications themselves make it clear that these two classes were by no means the nameless multitudes Yeats suggests here; he and George knew the personal names of members of both categories. That information did not further the image Yeats sought to build in the published version of the system, however, and so it was excluded.

Another important element brought up here is the relation of A Vision to philosophy. Here, for the sake of the mask he had donned, Yeats pretended an ignorance that he did not in fact possess. In his youth he had plunged into William Blake, and absorbed a wealth of philosophic insights from Blake himself and from the writings of Emmanuel Swedenborg, whose work so powerfully influenced Blake. Like every other serious participant in the Golden Dawn, furthermore, Yeats had made a systematic study of the literature of medieval magic and Cabala, with their deep roots in the Platonic and Pythagorean traditions.

Long before the first communications arrived, Yeats had followed up these earlier explorations by reading the works of Thomas Taylor, the Regency-era polymath who translated nearly every surviving word of ancient Greek philosophy into readable English. George, for her part, was even more philosophically literate than her husband; what they might have discussed over the dinner table is another question whose answer never found its way into Yeats’s chronicle. Keep in mind that Yeats is constructing a symbolic narrative out of the raw materials of the experience he and George shared, and you won’t be tempted to take it more literally than it deserves.

The rest of what can be learnt from the fifteen sections of this middle portion of Yeats’s notional packet can be left to interested readers. If they will simply note the figures and contraries in each section and match those up with the corresponding tarot trump, they will have no difficulty reading the message that Yeats has left for them here. Leaving those behind, let’s pass to the last part of the packet, the two sections Yeats titled simply “To Ezra Pound.” These correspond to the last two trumps in the French ordering, the Fool and the World.

In the first section Yeats passes on a warning that Pound was unwilling to heed. The Fool in the tarot deck is a foolish man in motley about to step over a cliff, toward which he is driven headlong by a barking dog. In Pound’s case, the dog was his own political and economic obsessions and the cliff was his enthusiasm for Italian Fascism, which would have seen him executed for treason after the Second World War if a clique of sympathetic psychologists hadn’t arranged to declare him insane and lock him up in an asylum as an alternative. (To be fair to the psychologists, Pound’s mental state was by no means especially stable by then, though the rigors of the war and its aftermath may have had something to do with that.)

As usual, however, there’s another level to this section. It portrays the world of the primary tincture as experienced by antithetical personalities such as Yeats and Pound: a world of practical politics and business, “all habit and memory,” to which sensitive and high-strung intellectuals such as Yeats and Pound were very poorly suited. Yeats had the good sense to recognize this. Pound did not.

The second section, corresponding to the tarot trump The World, presents the antithetical tincture in contrast to the primary. Here Yeats builds up an opposition of extraordinary intensity. He poses Oedipus, the sacred sacrificial hero of ancient myth, over against Christ, the sacred sacrificial hero of modern myth. He notes that Oedipus, having unknowingly committed the worst sins the ancient Greeks could imagine, lay upon the ground to die, and the redemption he brought to his age was signaled when the earth swallowed him up, while Jesus was traditionally without sin, died in an upright position on the Cross, and the redemption he brought to his age was signaled when he ascended into what Yeats calls the abstract sky.

These again are emblems of the primary and antithetical tinctures respectively, but they also have a relation to historical time. “Every two thousand and odd years”—that is, during each of the twelve zodiacal ages of 2160 years—one of these is sacred and the other secular: one of them the ground of everyday life, the other the contrary toward which an entire age must strive, without ever quite succeeding. The ancient world, in Yeats’s terms, was an antithetical age and therefore sought salvation from a primary redeemer; the modern world was a primary age and therefore sought salvation from an antithetical redeemer—and the age to come, the age Yeats believed was being born around him as he wrote, would be another antithetical age that would seek its salvation from another primary redeemer.

That was the message to which Yeats hoped to awaken Pound, reminding him with one of his own poems that it is these transformations of consciousness, not the squabbling of politicians, that poets are called to proclaim. That message will be central to a very large share of the discussions ahead.

Assignment: Over the next month, if you have the chance, read “Stories of Michael Robartes and His Friends” and the poem that follows it, “The Phases of the Moon.” It’s going to be two months before we return to this, as I’ll be traveling in the first half of June and therefore on hiatus; if you need more reading material, you might make a first pass through Yeats’s essay Per Amica Silentia Lunae, as A Vision is built on the foundation laid in this essay, and so it will be central to a couple of future discussions. You can download an electronic copy free of charge here from Project Gutenberg.