A Vision (1937)

«Mountains that shelter the bay from all but the south wind, bare brown branches of low vines and of tall trees blurring their outline as though with a soft mist; houses mirrored in an almost motionless sea; a verandahed gable a couple of miles away bringing to mind some Chinese painting.3 Rapallo’s thin line of broken mother-of-pearl along the water’s edge. The little town described in the “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”4 In what better place» — Yeats abre A Packet for Ezra Pound describiendo Rapallo, el lugar donde dice haber pensado buena parte del libro

«I shall not lack conversation. Ezra Pound, whose art is the opposite of mine, whose criticism commends what I most condemn, a man with whom I should quarrel more than with anyone else if we were not united by affection, has for years lived in rooms opening on to a flat roof by the sea.» — Yeats presenta a Pound como el interlocutor de Rapallo y define de entrada la oposición entre las dos poéticas

«Now at last he explains that it will, when the hundredth canto is finished, display a structure like that of a Bach Fugue.9 There will be no plot, no chronicle of events, no logic of discourse, but two themes, the Descent into Hades from Homer, a Metamorphosis from Ovid, and, mixed with these, mediaeval or modern historical» — Yeats transmite la explicación que Pound le da de la estructura de The Cantos: una fuga de Bach, sin trama ni cronología, con el Descenso al Hades de Homero y una Metamorfosis de Ovidio como temas

«He has tried to produce that picture Porteous commended to Nicholas Poussin in Le chef d’œuvre inconnu where everything rounds or thrusts itself without edges, without contours—conventions of the intellect—from a splash of tints and shades;» — Yeats compara el procedimiento de Pound con el cuadro sin contornos del relato de Balzac, donde todo se redondea sin las convenciones del intelecto

«He has shown me upon the wall a photograph of a Cosimo Tura decoration in three compartments, in the upper the Triumph of Love and the Triumph of Chastity, in the middle Zodiacal signs, and in the lower certain events in Cosimo Tura’s day.» — Yeats traduce el esquema de The Cantos a los tres registros de una decoración de Cosimo Tura: los elementos fijos ocupan el lugar del Zodiaco, las personas arquetípicas el de los Triunfos y los sucesos modernos el de los hechos del día

«I may, now that I have recovered leisure, find that the mathematical structure, when taken up into imagination, is more than mathematical, that seemingly irrelevant details fit together into a single theme, that here is no botch of tone and colour, all Hodos Chameliontos, except for some odd corner where one discovers beautiful detail like that finely modelled foot in Porteous’ disastrous picture.» — Yeats deja la cuestión en suspenso y llama a la alternativa por su nombre técnico: o la estructura matemática se vuelve más que matemática al entrar en la imaginación, o todo es Hodos Chameliontos

«Yet now that I recall the scene I think that he has no affection for cats—“some of them so ungrateful”, a friend says—he never nurses the café cat, I cannot imagine him with a cat of his own.» — Yeats corrige su propia escena de Pound alimentando gatos y niega que haya en ella afecto por los gatos

«I have been wondering if I shall go to church and seek the company of the English in the villas. At Oxford I went constantly to All Souls Chapel, though never at service time» — Yeats sitúa la tentación de volver a la iglesia y su costumbre de entrar en las capillas fuera de hora

«I am too anaemic for so British a faith; I shall haunt empty churches and be satisfied with Ezra Pound’s society and that of his travelling Americans.» — el modo en que Yeats declina esa vuelta, después de oír en un café la conversación sobre himnos y cerveza

«All that is laborious or mechanical in my book is finished; what remains can be added as a momentary rest from writing verse.» — Yeats da por terminada en 1928 la parte laboriosa del libro y trata lo que queda como descanso entre versos

«Descartes went on pilgrimage to some shrine of the Virgin when he made his first philosophical discovery, and the mountain road from Rapallo to Zoagli seems like something in my own mind, something that I have discovered.» — Yeats compara su propia gratitud con la peregrinación de Descartes tras su primer hallazgo filosófico

«“This way of publishing introductions to books, that are God knows when to come out, is either wholly new, or so long in practice that my small reading cannot trace it.”» — el epígrafe de Swift con que Yeats abre la introducción a A Vision: publicar introducciones a libros que aún no salen

«The other day Lady Gregory said to me: “You are a much better educated man than you were ten years ago and much more powerful in argument”. And I put The Tower and The Winding Stair into evidence to show that my poetry has gained in self-possession and power.21 I owe this change to an incredible experience.» — Yeats atribuye a una experiencia increíble el cambio que Lady Gregory le señala, y pone sus dos libros de poemas por prueba

«He supported his classification by a series of geometrical symbols and put these symbols in an order that answered the question in my essay as to whether some prophet could not prick upon the calendar the birth of a Napoleon or a Christ.» — el paso siguiente: los símbolos geométricos puestos en un orden que contesta la pregunta del ensayo sobre si un profeta podría marcar en el calendario el nacimiento de un Napoleón o de un Cristo

«A system of symbolism, strange to my wife and to myself, certainly awaited expression, and when I asked how long that would take I was told years.» — Yeats declara ajeno a los dos el sistema que pedía expresión, y consigna el plazo que le dieron

«Sometimes when my mind strays back to those first days I remember that Browning’s Paracelsus did not obtain the secret until he had written his spiritual history at the bidding of his Byzantine teacher, that before initiation Wilhelm Meister read his own history written by another, and I compare my Per Amica to those histories.» — Yeats compara su propio libro anterior con las historias que Paracelso y Wilhelm Meister debieron escribir o leer antes de la iniciación

«When the automatic writing began we were in a hotel on the edge of Ashdown Forest, but soon returned to Ireland and spent much of 1918 at Glendalough, at Rosses Point, at Coole Park, at a house near it, at Thoor Ballylee, always more or less solitary, my wife bored and fatigued by her almost daily task and I thinking and talking of little else.» — Yeats sitúa el primer año de la escritura automática y consigna sin adorno el cansancio y el aburrimiento de su mujer frente a su propio arrobamiento

«My teachers did not seem to speak out of her sleep but as if from above it, as though it were a tide upon which they floated.» — Yeats describe la posición desde la que le parecía que hablaban sus maestros: no desde el sueño de ella sino por encima, como flotando sobre una marea

«A chance word spoken before she fell asleep would sometimes start a dream that broke in upon the communications, as if from below, to trouble or overwhelm, as when she dreamed she was a cat lapping milk or a cat curled up asleep and therefore dumb. The cat returned night after night, and once when I tried to drive it away by making the sound one makes when playing at being a dog to amuse a child, she awoke trembling, and the shock was so violent that I never dared repeat it.» — la interferencia del sueño propio de la médium: el gato que vuelve noche tras noche y el sobresalto que Yeats no se atrevió a repetir

«once I remember saying to a friend as we came out of Sant’Ambrogio at Milan, “That is my tradition and I will let no priest rob me”.» — la frase que Yeats se atribuye a la salida de Sant’Ambrogio de Milán, donde reclama la tradición para sí y no para el clero

«and that which is from a combat with circumstance, and upon this simple distinction he built up an elaborate classification of men according to their more or less complete expression of one type or the other.» — la continuación en la plana siguiente: sobre esa distinción entre el combate consigo mismo y el combate con las circunstancias se levanta la clasificación de los hombres

«Early in 1919 the communicator of the moment—they were constantly changed—said they would soon change the method from the written to the spoken word as that would fatigue her less, but the change did not come for some months.» — el comunicador de turno anuncia a comienzos de 1919 el paso de la palabra escrita a la hablada para fatigar menos a la médium

«My questions must be accurately worded, and, because they said their thought was swifter than ours, asked without delay or hesitation. I was constantly reproved for vague or confused questions» — las condiciones que le imponían: precisión y rapidez, porque decían pensar más aprisa que nosotros

«they kept me from mastering that conception. They shifted ground whenever my interest was at its height, whenever it seemed that the next day must reveal what, as I soon discovered, they were determined to withhold until all was upon paper.» — Yeats atribuye a los comunicadores el propósito deliberado de impedirle dominar la concepción geométrica única en que se apoyaba la exposición

«They drew their first symbolical map of that history, and marked upon it the principal years of crisis, early in July 1918, some days before the publication of the first German edition of Spengler’s Decline of the West, which, though founded upon a different philosophy, gives the same years of crisis and draws the same general conclusions, and then returned to the soul’s judgment.» — Yeats fecha el primer mapa simbólico de la historia europea días antes de la primera edición alemana de Spengler y consigna la coincidencia de años de crisis pese a la distinta filosofía

«I believe that they so changed their theme because, had I grasped their central idea, I would have lacked the patience and the curiosity to follow their application of it, preferring some hasty application of my own.» — la explicación que Yeats se da de esos cambios de tema: si hubiera captado la idea central, le habría faltado paciencia para seguir la aplicación

«They once told me not to speak of any part of the system, except of the incarnations which were almost fully expounded, because if I did the people I talked to would talk to other people, and the communicators would mistake that misunderstanding for their own thought.» — la prohibición de hablar del sistema y su razón: el malentendido ajeno volvería a ellos como si fuera su propio pensamiento

«For the same reason they asked me not to read philosophy until their exposition was complete, and this increased my difficulties.» — la segunda prohibición: no leer filosofía hasta terminada la exposición

«Apart from two or three of the principal Platonic Dialogues I knew no philosophy. Arguments with my father, whose convictions had been formed by John Stuart Mill’s attack upon Sir William Hamilton, had destroyed my confidence and driven me from speculation to the direct experience of the Mystics.» — Yeats declara su desconocimiento de la filosofía y lo achaca a las discusiones con su padre, que lo empujaron de la especulación a la experiencia directa de los místicos

«I had once known Blake as thoroughly as his unfinished confused Prophetic Books permitted, and I had read Swedenborg and Boehme, and my initiation into the “Hermetic Students” had filled my head with Cabbalistic imagery, but there was nothing in Blake, Swedenborg, Boehme or the Cabbala to help me now.» — Yeats enumera su bagaje ocultista previo —Blake, Swedenborg, Boehme, la imaginería cabalística de los Hermetic Students— y declara que nada de eso le servía

«They encouraged me, however, to read history in relation to their historical logic, and biography in relation to their twenty-eight typical incarnations, that I might give concrete expression to their abstract thought.» — en cambio le mandaron leer historia según su lógica histórica y biografía según las veintiocho encarnaciones, para dar expresión concreta a su pensamiento abstracto

«and if my mind returned too soon to their unmixed abstraction they would say, “We are starved”.» — la queja con que los comunicadores le reclamaban lo concreto

«Because they must, as they explained, soon finish, others whom they named Frustrators attempted to confuse us or waste time.31 Who these Frustrators were or why they acted so was never adequately explained, nor will be unless I can finish “The Soul in Judgment” (Book III of this work), but they were always ingenious and sometimes cruel.» — Yeats introduce a los Frustrators como agentes que confunden o hacen perder tiempo, y declara no haber recibido explicación adecuada de quiénes eran

«I would spread out the script and he would cross all out back to the answer that began it, but had I not divined frustration he would have said nothing.» — la condición que Yeats señala: la corrección solo llegaba si él adivinaba primero la frustración

«A predecessor of his had described the geometrical symbolism as created for my assistance and had seemed to dislike it, another had complained that I used it to make their thought mechanical, and a Frustrator doubtless played upon my weakness when he described a geometrical model of the soul’s state after death which could be turned upon a lathe.» — las objeciones internas al simbolismo geométrico: un comunicador lo daba por hecho para su ayuda y parecía no quererlo, otro le reprochaba mecanizar su pensamiento, y un Frustrator le ofreció un modelo torneable del alma después de la muerte

«It was part of their purpose to affirm that all the gains of man come from conflict with the opposite of his true being.» — el principio que Yeats les atribuye: todo lo que el hombre gana viene del conflicto con lo opuesto de su verdadero ser

«One said, as though it rested with me to decide what part I should play in their dream, “Remember we will deceive you if we can”.» — la advertencia que Yeats consigna en boca de uno de ellos

«Upon the other hand they seem like living men, are interested in all that interests living men, as when at Oxford, where we spent our winters, one asked upon hearing an owl hoot in the garden, if he might be silent for a while. “Sounds like that”, he said, “give us great pleasure.”» — el rasgo contrario que Yeats también consigna: se comportan como vivos, y uno pidió silencio para oír un búho

«Some six months before the communications came to an end, a communicator announced that he was about to explain a new branch of the philosophy and seemed to add, “But please do not write anything down, for when all is finished I will dictate a summary”. He spoke almost nightly for I think three months, and at last I said, “Let me make notes, I cannot keep it all in my head”. He was disturbed to find that I had written nothing down, and when I told him of the voice, said it was frustration and that he could not summarise.» — el episodio de frustración más largo: tres meses de exposición nocturna perdidos porque una voz le había pedido no tomar notas

«While we were staying at a village near Oxford we met two or three nights in succession what seemed a sudden warm breath coming up from the ground at the same corner of the road.» — el primero de los fenómenos que Yeats dice haber acompañado a la escritura: un aliento tibio del suelo en la misma esquina, tres noches seguidas

«Book I: The Great Wheel Part I: The Principal Symbol Part II: Examination of the Wheel Part III: The Twenty-Eight Incarnations Book II: The Completed Symbol Book III: The Soul in Judgment Book IV: The Great Year of the Ancients Book V: Dove or Swan All Souls’ Night: An Epilogue» — el índice del volumen ordena los cinco Books del sistema y cierra con el poema epílogo

«Appendix I: Proofs, Versions, Emendations, and Hyphenations Corrections to the Yeatses’ Copies of A Vision Comparison of A Vision with Proofs» — el índice anuncia el primer apéndice de las editoras, con las correcciones de los ejemplares de los Yeats y el cotejo con las pruebas

«Thank you for downloading this Simon & Schuster ebook.» — la primera plana del troceo no es portada sino la página promocional del ebook de Simon & Schuster: el volumen se leyó en su forma electrónica

«End-of-Line Word Division in the Copy Text Appendix II: Earlier Versions Excised Section of “Rapallo” (Packet, 7–9) Book II Typescript (NLI 36,272/6/1b, leaves 2–5) Book II Typescript (NLI 36,272/6/1b, leaves 14–18) Book II Typescript (NLI 36,272/6/1b, leaves 30–32) Book III Typescript (NLI 36,272/6/2a, leaves 5–8) Book III Typescript (NLI 36,272/6/2a, leaves 14–26) Book IV Typescript (NLI 36,272/26, leaves 10–12) Book IV Typescript (NLI 36,272/30, leaf 28) Book V Typescript (NLI 36,272/6/2c)» — el índice anuncia el segundo apéndice, que reproduce la sección excisa de *Rapallo* y los typescripts de los Books II a V con su signatura en la National Library of Ireland

«The editors gratefully acknowledge the extraordinary generosity of the Yeats family, the late Michael, Gráinne, and Anne Yeats, and Caitríona Yeats, who, along with her siblings Siobhán, the late Síle, and Padraig Yeats, continues a legacy of unwavering support of those who “cough in ink” or pixels to edit and annotate the work of W. B. Yeats.» — Harper y Paul abren el prefacio agradeciendo a la familia Yeats el acceso continuado a los materiales, y describen a los editores del poeta con una frase suya

«We also extend the first order of thanks to Walter and Connie Kelly Hood, the first designated editors of the 1937 A Vision for this series.» — Harper y Paul consignan que no fueron las primeras editoras designadas para este tomo: el encargo era de Walter y Connie Kelly Hood

«To observe that this edition would not have been possible without their extensive archival and contextual work is to understate drastically, and we are deeply in their debt.» — Harper y Paul declaran que su edición depende del trabajo de archivo y de contexto de los Hood

«and Samantha Martin and Ashley Gilliam, our patient and thoroughly helpful editors at Scribner.» — cierran el prefacio nombrando a sus editoras en Scribner

«AS Automatic Script [see YVP 1, 2].» — la sigla con que el aparato remite a la escritura automática, editada en los dos primeros tomos de los Vision Papers

«AVA-Laurie W. B. Yeats. A Vision: An Explanation of Life Founded upon the Writings of Giraldus and upon Certain Doctrines attributed to Kusta Ben Luka. London: T. Werner Laurie, 1925.» — la lista de abreviaturas conserva el título largo de la edición de 1925, con la mención a Giraldus y a Kusta Ben Luka que la de 1937 abandona

«TS carbon NLI 36,272/6, identified by Connie K. Hood as a carbon of the setting-copy typescript sent to Macmillan for production of A Vision.» — el carbón del typescript de imprenta, identificado por Connie K. Hood, es la pieza con que las editoras cotejan el impreso de 1937

«YL The Yeats Library, housed in the National Library of Ireland. Full listings are available in O’Shea (which numbering system the library follows) and Chapman (which includes some items not in O’Shea).» — la biblioteca de los Yeats, conservada en la National Library of Ireland, es la base con que el aparato documenta las lecturas del poeta

«YVP 1 The Automatic Script: 5 November 1917–18 June 1918. Ed. Steve L. Adams, Barbara J. Frieling, and Sandra L. Sprayberry. Yeats’s Vision Papers. Vol. 1, gen. ed. George Mills Harper, assisted by Mary Jane Harper.» — el primer tomo de los Vision Papers acota las fechas de la escritura automática entre noviembre de 1917 y junio de 1918

«YVP 4 “The Discoveries of Michael Robartes,” Version B [“The Great Wheel” and “The Twenty-Eight Embodiments”]. Ed. George Mills Harper and Margaret Mills Harper. Yeats’s Vision Papers. Vol. 4» — el cuarto tomo de los Vision Papers edita la versión B de los Discoveries de Michael Robartes, con The Great Wheel y The Twenty-Eight Embodiments

«Stories Stories of Michael Robartes and his Friends: An Extract from a Record Made by his Pupils: And a Play in Prose. Dublin: Cuala Press, 1931.» — las Stories que 1937 incorpora se habían publicado antes por su cuenta, en Cuala Press y con una obra de teatro en prosa

«1. W. B. Yeats, 1907 2. Portrait of Giraldus 3. [Unicorn] 4. The Great Wheel 5. [Cones of Discord and Concord] 6. [Cones of Time, Space, Subjectivity, and Objectivity] 7. [Primary and Antithetical Cones] 8. [Relationship between Will and Creative Mind] 9. [Just before Complete Antithetical Expansion] 10. [Just after Complete Antithetical Expansion] 11. [Antithetical Man] 12. [Primary Man] 13. [Complete Primary State] 14. [Midway between Primary and Antithetical] 15. [Lunar Phases on Gyres] 16. [Lunar Phases on Circle] 17. [Lunar Phases on the Great Wheel] 18. [Principles and Authentic Existants of Plotinus] 19. [Principles when Will Passing Phase 17] 20. [Principles when Will at Phase 15] 21. [Movement of the Four Faculties within Cones of the Principles] 22. The Historical Cones» — la lista de ilustraciones del volumen: veintidós figuras, la mayoría diagramas del sistema entre corchetes, y entre ellas sigue el retrato de Giraldus, la ficción que el texto de 1937 ya no sostiene en su prosa

«A Vision was impossible to finish, much to WBY’s dismay, and despite repeated claims of near or final completion. But he never stopped trying. Having published a first, limited edition with T. Werner Laurie, a version he regarded as seriously flawed, WBY immediately began revising. Even after a second edition was published by Macmillan a dozen years after the first, WBY found it incomplete, imperfect, inadequate.» — Harper y Paul abren la introducción con el rasgo que ordena toda la historia textual del libro: Yeats nunca lo dio por terminado, ni siquiera después de la segunda edición

«Mr. Yeats called in here just before Christmas and wants us to produce a new edition of a book entitled “A Vision” which I think he printed privately many years ago, and which has also been published in another form in the past. I believe it now to be out of print, and Mr. Yeats has largely re-written it. I do not know whether he spoke to you about it, but I assume he had done so. If so, you will realise that the subject matter of the book is one that makes a very limited appeal. To most ordinary minds it appears to be quite mad, and I cannot believe that the sale will be anything but a very small one. I rather gathered from Mr. Yeats that he shared this view.» — las editoras citan la carta de Harold Macmillan al agente de Yeats en diciembre de 1934, donde el editor calcula una venta mínima y dice que el propio poeta comparte esa previsión

«Three years later, Edmund Wilson wondered whether WBY, who shrouded the revelations of AVA in fictions, “intends us to take it seriously” and whether the poet was “really attempting, in a sense, to eat his cake and have it, too?”» — Edmund Wilson, según lo citan las editoras, pone en duda que Yeats quiera que se le tome en serio y le atribuye querer las dos cosas a la vez

«G. R. S. Mead, on the other hand, aimed to get to the bottom of the fictions, saying that the book would be of greater value had WBY “told us quite frankly how he became possessed of the information.”» — G. R. S. Mead, en la cita que traen las editoras, le pide a Yeats que declare abiertamente cómo obtuvo la información, es decir que abandone la ficción

«he noted in a letter to his old friend Olivia Shakespear in September 1929 that “this new edition will be a new book, all I hope clear and as simple as the subject permits.”» — Yeats, en la carta a Olivia Shakespear que citan las editoras, anuncia la segunda edición como libro nuevo y no como corrección

«I have constructed a myth, but then one can believe in a myth— one only assents to philosophy. Heaven is an improvement of sense—one listens to music, one does not read Hegel’s logic.”» — el propósito que Yeats declara en esa misma carta: un mito, que admite creencia, frente a una filosofía, que solo admite asentimiento

«we note corrections made by WBY and GY (equally responsible for the construction of the system of A Vision) after the publication of the second edition—made mostly in anticipation of an Edition De Luxe of the poet’s work, of which A Vision was to have been a part.» — las editoras anuncian que registrarán las correcciones posteriores a 1937, hechas con vistas a una Edition De Luxe que nunca salió; entre paréntesis adjudican a George Yeats responsabilidad igual en la construcción del sistema

«In April 1925, WBY celebrated finishing A Vision, declaring himself free to “write letters again & idle,” but that feeling would not last.» — las editoras fechan en abril de 1925 el alivio de Yeats por haber terminado, y lo dan por efímero

«On May 22, 1925, well before AVA-Laurie was published on January 15, 1926, WBY wrote to GY that he was reading Plato’s Timaeus, works by Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie on the Egyptian origin of mystical thought, and the texts of Hermes Trismegistus.» — las editoras documentan las lecturas de Yeats en mayo de 1925: el Timeo, Petrie sobre el origen egipcio del pensamiento místico y los textos de Hermes Trismegisto

«One of the most important sources for AVB is the magisterial multivolume Système du monde of the French physicist and historian of science Pierre Duhem, a work that both traces and argues for the importance of premodern and medieval science.» — las editoras adjudican al Système du monde de Pierre Duhem el papel de fuente mayor de la versión de 1937

«WBY’s French was shaky, and Duhem’s prose is very dense; Duhem’s influence on AVB testifies to the continuing importance of GY, who almost certainly translated for her husband.» — las editoras infieren de la dificultad del francés de Yeats la intervención de George Yeats como traductora

«Although the AS had more or less tapered off by the mid-1920s, GY continued to be an essential consultant on the ideas she and WBY had developed together (occasionally still in conjunction with the supernatural communicators of the automatic experiments).» — las editoras acotan hasta dónde llega la escritura automática y dónde sigue el trabajo de George Yeats: hacia mediados de los años veinte la sesión se había ido apagando, pero la consulta continuó

«The first edition had received limited and critical reviews. An anonymous reviewer in The New Statesman called the book “a dark and difficult study.”» — el juicio anónimo con que las editoras abren la recepción de la primera versión

«We treat the editing process for those editions, which rather than producing the definitive editions they advertised introduced further errors.» — el juicio de las editoras sobre las reediciones llamadas corregidas de 1956, 1961 y 1962

«However, WBY continues, “When the proof sheets came I felt myself relieved from my promise not to read philosophy and began with Berkeley.”» — la frase de Yeats con que las editoras explican el arranque de su curso de lectura filosófica: las galeradas lo liberan de la promesa hecha a los instructores

«“inferior Latin” of the title of the fictitious source, the “Speculum Angelorum et Homenorum,” concluding that spelling to be “a ‘howler’ for which Smith Minor at a Preparatory School would receive condign punishment.”» — el resto de esa objeción de Mead, ya en la plana siguiente, con la grafía Homenorum tal como la imprime esta plana

«These retentions do not mean that WBY intended simple corrections: he was convinced that the first version of A Vision was deeply flawed.» — las editoras separan las secciones que 1937 conserva casi intactas del propósito con que Yeats las conservó: no venía a corregir sino a rehacer

«From then through early March, the two corresponded frequently, with WBY trying to clarify lunar and solar movement, the importance of gyres to St. Thomas Aquinas and Virgil, relationships between the Yeatses’ system and astronomical movement, Macrobius’s Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, the Syrian gnostic poet Bardesanes, the “dog Latin” of the fictional title Speculum Angelorum et Hominorum, and the writings of the Elizabethan mathematician and occultist Dr. John Dee.» — las editoras enumeran los asuntos del intercambio entre Yeats y Sturm en el invierno de 1926, del movimiento solar y lunar al latín macarrónico del Speculum y a los escritos de John Dee

«As early as May 1926, WBY was recommending against buying the book, which he described as “horribly expensive” and “only a first draft of a book & intended for students of Plotinus, the Hermetic fragments & unpopular literature of that kind.”» — Yeats desaconseja comprar su propio libro y lo llama primer borrador para lectores de Plotino y de los fragmentos herméticos

«I see now that section XII Book IV in ‘A Vision’ should have been the most important in the book, & it is the slightest and worst.”» — el juicio de Yeats sobre su propio Libro IV en un diario posterior a marzo de 1927

«A page later, in what may be a continuation of the same entry or a separate entry, he observes, “The part of ‘Vision’ about the Beatitude is also poor.”» — el mismo cuaderno condena también el pasaje sobre la Beatitude

«An undated entry in the 1921 notebook is organized around questions from Mary Devenport O’Neill: “How is will affected by 26000 year cycle?”; “How is civilization upheld in 2000 year gyre?”; “Has a daimon any separate masters apart from human being to whom it belongs?”; “How do Four Principles affect us during life?”; “What sort of ghosts are Daimons & Demigods?”; “What accounts for out burst, literature all lower northern Europe in 19th century?”» — las editoras traen la lista de preguntas de Mary Devenport O’Neill en torno a las cuales Yeats organiza una entrada del cuaderno de 1921: el ciclo de veintiséis mil años, el giro de dos mil, los amos del daimon, los Cuatro Principios en vida y la clase de fantasmas que son Daimons y Demigods

«I have really finished ‘A VISION’—I turn over the pages & find nothing to add. I am still at Coole but go to Dublin to morrow to dictate ‘A Vision’ from my MSS to a certain young man, a friend of McGreavys who has come from Paris for the purpose.”» — una de las declaraciones de conclusión que las editoras van registrando, en carta a Olivia Shakespear de febrero de 1931

«These claims of completion continue.» — el comentario con que las editoras cierran la serie de anuncios de conclusión