In the autumn of 1917 William Butler Yeats was at a turning point in his life and his two careers, the public one and the other, secret one. In his public career as an author, he had clawed his way up from among the crowd of writers whose work kept the British publishing industry of…
Tag: William Butler Yeats
The Castle of Heroes
I really wonder sometimes how many people nowadays realize just how drastically the great occult revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century has been scrubbed from the officially approved histories of our time. It’s hard to discuss the matter without bringing in words like “censorship.” Whole chapters of the cultural history of the…
The Death of God: A Speculation
I have been reading William Butler Yeats’ strangest book, A Vision, for the—how many times has it been now? At least once for each of his twenty-eight phases of the Moon, surely, since I first picked up a battered paperback copy from a used book store in Seattle, one of those cramped and marvelous places…