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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.
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.
Author: Patrick J. Keane
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781800643222
Category : Occultism in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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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.
Author: Erik Reenberg Sand
Publisher:
ISBN: 0190853883
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 361
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Book Description
The essays in Imagining the East explore how Theosophists during the formative period imagined the religions and cultures of the East. The authors examine the relationship of such representations to orientalism, the history of ideas, politics, and culture at large and discuss how these esoteric or theosophical representations mirrored conditions and values current in nineteenth-century mainstream intellectual culture. The essays also look at how the early Theosophical Society's representations of the East differed from mainstream 'orientalism' and how the Theosophical Society's mission in India was distinct from that of British colonialism and Christian missionaries.
Author: Alfred Percy Sinnett
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Buddha (The concept)
Languages : en
Pages : 282
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Book Description
This theory recognizes the evolution of the soul as a process that is quite continuous in itself, though carried out partly through the instrumentality of a great series of dissociated forms. Putting aside for the moment of profound metaphysics of the theory which trace the principle of life from the original first cause of the cosmos, we find the soul as an entity emerging from the animal kingdom, and passing into the earliest human forms, without being at that time ripe for the higher intellectual life with which the present state of humanity renders us familiar. But through successive incarnations in forms whose physical improvement, under the Darwinian law, is constantly fitting them to be its habitation at each return to objective life, it gradually gathers that enormous range of experience which is summed up in its higher development. In the intervals between its physical incarnations it prolongs and works out, and finally exhausts or transmutes into so much abstract development, the personal experiences of each life. This is the clue to the true explanation of that apparent difficulty which besets the cruder form of the theory of reincarnation which independent speculation has sometimes thrown out. Each man is unconscious of having led previous lives, therefore he contends that subsequent lives can afford him no compensation for this one. He overlooks the enormous importance of the intervening spiritual condition, in which he by no means forgets the personal adventures and emotions he has just passed through, and in the course of which he distills these into so much cosmic progress. In the following pages the elucidation of this profoundly interesting mystery is attempted, and it will be seen that the view of events now afforded us is not only a solution of the problems of life and death, but of many very perplexing experiences on the borderland between those conditions - or rather between physical and spiritual life - which have engaged attention and speculation so widely of recent years in most civilized countries.
Author: Annie Besant
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Theosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 152
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Book Description
Author: Gary Lachman
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
ISBN: 1585428639
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 354
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Book Description
Chronicles the life of the cofounder of the Theosophical Society, examining her legacy and the controversy surrounding her.
Author: Seán Golden
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781782054009
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
"The association of Yeats with Asia suggests references to Byzantium, Theosophy, the influence of Mohini Chatterjee, Occultism, Rabindranath Tagore or the Upanishads, Nōh theatre, masks or his fugitive use of Zen koans, and the gyres as a version of Yin and Yang. Yeats made explicit references to Asian matters in his works, like the Buddha in 'The Statues,' as well as implicit references that might be evident to Asian readers but otherwise opaque, like the 'polished mirror' in Per Amica Silentia Lunae. There is also the vexed and vexing question of 'Asia' itself'. For the ancient Greeks it was the far shore of the Aegean Sea, the opposite and 'Other' of their own 'Europe,' long before Edward Said called attention to the implications and consequences of 'Orientalism'. Many experts doubt that Yeats 'correctly' understood the Asian cultural references that he cherry-picked for his own purposes. Others doubt that it really mattered, since he turned everything he touched to his own idiosyncratic use anyway. These essays revisit the roles of West, South and East Asia in his work and revise the theoretical bases that have been applied to his use of Asia in the past"--
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.
Author: Susan Johnston Graf
Publisher: Weiser Books
ISBN: 1609254953
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 questa quest greatly influenced by Celtic lore, Theosophy, Golden Dawn ceremonial magic, Swedenborg's metaphysics, the works of Jacob Boehme, and NeoPlatonism. 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 Yeat's poetry is brilliant, lyric narrative of realtiy captured through the mind of a practicing magician working in the Western Tradition.
Author: Annie Besant
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Theosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 106
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Book Description
