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.

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.

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.

W. B. Yeats's a Vision

W. B. Yeats's a Vision PDF Author: Neil Mann
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 098353392X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 395

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Book Description
The first volume of essays devoted to W. B. Yeats's 'A Vision' and the associated system developed by Yeats and his wife, George. 'A Vision' is all-encompassing in its stated aims and scope, and it invites a wide range of approaches--as demonstrated in the essays collected here, written by the foremost scholars in the field.

Mythologies

Mythologies PDF Author: William Butler Yeats
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0684826216
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
This is the definitive edition of W.B. Yeats's folklore & early prose fiction, edited according to Yeats's final textual instructions. Its extensive annotation makes luminous Yeats's 'fibrous darkness', that 'matrix out of which everything else has come', by dealing with oral & written sources, abandoned & unpublished writings.

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

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 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.

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.

Modernist Alchemy

Modernist Alchemy PDF Author: Timothy Materer
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501728571
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
Modernist Alchemy takes a close look at the work of twentieth-century poets whose use of the occult constitutes a recovery of discarded beliefs and modes of thought: Yeats and Plath try to dismiss conventional religion, Hughes captures a sense of adventure, H.D. seeks to liberate repressed concepts, while Duncan and Merrill hunt for a lost understanding of sexual identity which will allow for androgyny and homosexuality.

The Celestial Tradition

The Celestial Tradition PDF Author: Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
ISBN: 1554588057
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Despite the painstaking work of Pound scholars, the mythos of The Cantos has yet to be properly understood — primarily because until now its occult sources have not been examined sufficiently. Drawing upon archival as well as recently published material, this study traces Pound’s intimate engagement with specific occultists (W.B. Yeats, Allen Upward, Alfred Orage, and G.R.S. Mead) and their ideas. The author argues that speculative occultism was a major factor in the evolution of Pound’s extraordinary aesthetic and religious sensibility, much noticed in Pound criticism. The discussion falls into two sections. The first section details Pound’s interest in particular occult movements. It describes the tradition of Hellenistic occultism from Eleusis to the present, and establishes that Pound’s contact with the occult began at least as early as his undergraduate years and that he came to London already primed on the occult. Many of his London acquaintances were unquestionably occultists. The second section outlines a tripartite schema for The Cantos (katabasis/dromena/epopteia) which, in turn, is applied to the poem. It is argued here that The Cantos is structured on the model of a initiation rather than a journey, and that the poem does not so much describe an initiation rite as enact one for the reader. In exploring and attempting to understand Pounds’ occultism and its implications to his [Pounds’] oeuvre, Tryphonopoulos sheds new light upon one of the great works of modern Western literature.