Talking to the Gods

Talking to the Gods PDF Author: Susan Johnston Graf
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438455550
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
Explores occultism in the writings of four authors who were members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Talking to the Gods explores the linkages between the imaginative literature and the occult beliefs and practices of four writers who were members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. William Butler Yeats, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and Dion Fortune were all members of the occult organization for various periods from 1890 to 1930. Yeats, of course, is both a canonical and well-loved poet. Machen is revered as a master of the weird tale. Blackwood’s work dealing with the supernatural was popular during the first half of the twentieth century and has been influential in the development of the fantasy genre. Fortune’s books are acknowledged as harbingers of trends in second-wave feminist spirituality. Susan Johnston Graf examines practices, beliefs, and ideas engendered within the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and demonstrates how these are manifest in each author’s work, including Yeats’s major theoretical work, A Vision.

Talking to the Gods

Talking to the Gods PDF Author: Susan Johnston Graf
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438455550
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 180

Get Book

Book Description
Explores occultism in the writings of four authors who were members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Talking to the Gods explores the linkages between the imaginative literature and the occult beliefs and practices of four writers who were members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. William Butler Yeats, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and Dion Fortune were all members of the occult organization for various periods from 1890 to 1930. Yeats, of course, is both a canonical and well-loved poet. Machen is revered as a master of the weird tale. Blackwood’s work dealing with the supernatural was popular during the first half of the twentieth century and has been influential in the development of the fantasy genre. Fortune’s books are acknowledged as harbingers of trends in second-wave feminist spirituality. Susan Johnston Graf examines practices, beliefs, and ideas engendered within the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and demonstrates how these are manifest in each author’s work, including Yeats’s major theoretical work, A Vision.

The Birth of Modernism

The Birth of Modernism PDF Author: Leon Surette
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 9780773512436
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
In The Birth of Modernism Leon Surette challenges our traditional understanding of modernism by situating the origins of modernist aesthetics in the occult.

The Cambridge Companion to W. B. Yeats

The Cambridge Companion to W. B. Yeats PDF Author: Marjorie Elizabeth Howes
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521650895
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
A comprehensive and accessible introduction to the major themes of this important poet's life and career.

Yeats, Folklore and Occultism

Yeats, Folklore and Occultism PDF Author: Frank Kinahan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000639355
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
This lively introduction to the poems of W. B. Yeats, first published in 1988, provides a series of intriguing new readings of his work in relation to his profound involvement with occultism and folklore. During Yeats’s formative years as an artist, two compelling movements were emerging: the revivals of interest in Irish folklore and in the mag

W.B. Yeats--twentieth-century Magus

W.B. Yeats--twentieth-century Magus PDF Author: Susan Johnston Graf
Publisher: Weiser Books
ISBN: 9781578631384
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
W.B. Yeats -- Twentieth-Century Magus is a comprehensive study of his magical practices and beliefs. Yeats moved through many different phases of spiritual development, believing that his life was an intellectual, spiritual, and artistic quest -- a quest greatly influenced by Celtic lore, Theosophy, Golden Dawn ceremonial magic, Swedenborg's metaphysics, the works of Jacob Boehme, and Neo-Platonism. For Yeats, writing poetry was an act of divine possession, and he believed that a perfected soul was the source of his inspiration, visiting him during times of superconscious awareness. Susan Johnston Graf meticulously documents and provides evidence that Yeats's poetry is a brilliant, lyric narrative of reality captured through the mind of a practicing magician working in the Western Tradition.

Yeats and the Occult

Yeats and the Occult PDF Author: George Mills Harper
Publisher: Macmillan of Canada : Maclean-Hunter Press
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description


Making the Void Fruitful

Making the Void Fruitful PDF Author: Patrick J. Keane
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781800643246
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
Shedding fresh light on the life and work of William Butler Yeats--widely acclaimed as the major English-language poet of the twentieth century--this new study by leading scholar Patrick J. Keane questions established understandings of the Irish poet's long fascination with the occult: a fixation that repelled literary contemporaries T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden, but which enhanced Yeats's vision of life and death. Through close reading of selected poems, the first section of Making the Void Fruitful assesses Yeats's spiritualised treatment of corporeal themes, exploring sex and eroticism as the expression of a duality inherent to his ontological and supernatural convictions. The power-producing tension in Yeats's work is not only intellectual but emotional. At its vital centre is his Muse: the beautiful political firebrand, Maud Gonne, whose activist Republican politics he considered his one real rival. Through close engagement with the poems and plays she inspired, the second section explores Yeats's complex relationship with Maud, an obsessive and unrequited love which he sublimated and transformed into the greatest body of Muse poetry since Petrarch, in whose tradition of spiritualized eroticism Yeats, perhaps the last of the great Romantics, was consciously writing. Shaped by the conviction that no modern poet exceeded Yeats in animating the enduring themes of love and spirituality through poetry, this book emphasises the influence, of Blake, Nietzsche, and John Donne, on what Yeats called 'the thinking of the body'. Grounded firmly in the textual materiality of Yeats's oeuvre, this book will be of interest to researchers and students of W.B. Yeats, as well as to those in the fields of Anglophone literatures and cultures, and philosophy.

Envisioning Ireland

Envisioning Ireland PDF Author: Claire Nally
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783039118823
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Although Yeats is an over-theorized author, little attempt has been made to situate his occult works in the political context of 20th-century Ireland. This book provides a methodology for understanding the political and cultural impulses which informed Yeat's engagement with the otherworld.

W.B.Yeats and W.T.Horton

W.B.Yeats and W.T.Horton PDF Author: George Mills Harper
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349048593
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description


Yeats and Theosophy

Yeats and Theosophy PDF Author: Ken Monteith
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135915628
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
When H. P. Blavatsky, the controversial head of the turn of the century movement Theosophy, defined "a true Theosophist" in her book The Key to Theosophy, she could have just as easily have been describing W. B. Yeats. Blavatsky writes, "A true Theosophist must put in practice the loftiest moral ideal, must strive to realize his unity with the whole of humanity, and work ceaselessly for others." Although Yeats joined Blavatsky's group in 1887, and subsequently left to help form The Golden Dawn in 1890, Yeats's career as poet and politician were very much in line with the methods set forth by Blavatsky's doctrine. My project explores how Yeats employs this pop-culture occultism in the creation of his own national literary aesthetic. This project not only examines the influence theosophy has on the literary work Yeats produced in the late 1880's and 1890's, but also Yeats's work as literary critic and anthology editor during that time. While Yeats uses theosophy's metaphysical world view to provide an underlying structure for some of his earliest poetry and drama, he uses theosophy's methods of investigation and argument to discover a metaphysical literary tradition which incorporates all of his own literary heroes into an Irish cultural tradition. Theosophy provides a methodology for Yeats to argue that both Shelley and Blake (for example) are part of a tradition that includes himself. Basing his argument in theosophy, Yeats can argue that the Irish people are a distinct race with a culture more "sincere" and "natural" than that of England.