“A new science”: Yeats's A Vision and relativistic cosmology

Abstract

In this essay I will place Yeats's enigmatic text A Vision in the context of contemporary science, challenging constructions of Yeats's career as committedly anti-scientific. As I will show, Yeats's philosophy is in fact merely anti-Newtonian and anti-positivist, as relativistic science was not incompatible with his occult interests. I will offer an alternative reading of this text, explaining key aspects of its construction in relation to the post-Einsteinian revolution in cosmology, which, I will argue, was ultimately creatively enabling for him.

Keywords::

• Yeats
• A Vision
• literature and science
• cosmology

Notes

^1. Yeats, Autobiographies, 82.

^2. McDonald, “Accidental Variations,” 152.

^3. Eagleton, Scholars and Rebels, 90.

^4. Yeats, Pages from a Diary, 58; and Mann, “A Vision,” 160.

^5. Although Yeats's wife George was the medium for this automatic writing, Yeats influenced the process by asking questions which shaped her responses and took control of editing the script into the book that became A Vision.

^6. Harper, “Yeats and the Occult,” 160.

^7. The sun and moon and their light are opposed principles in Yeats's dualistic system, associated with the tinctures. The sun is broadly associated with reality, knowledge, objective truth, the comic and the urge to submerge individuality in the greater external whole. The moon is associated with creation, subjectivity, the psychic, choice, the tragic and the impulse to assert individuality.

^8. Jeans, Mysterious Universe, 98.

^9. The individual would be born associated with one of the phases and move through the whole of the Great Wheel in the course of his life; this life being made up of many incarnations.

^10. Mann, “A Vision,” 164.

^11. AVB, 193 (my italics).

^12. Harper, George Mills, The Making of Yeats's ‘A Vision’, 407–8.

^13. Eddington, Space, Time and Gravitation, 197.

^14. Albright, Quantum Poetics, 13.

^15. Owen, The Place of Enchantment, 239.

^16. Bowler, Science for All, 23. Oliver Lodge was passionately concerned to preserve the idea of an ether despite the Einsteinian revolution, as he felt it was necessary for his occult beliefs; this was not incompatible with Einstein's own views. Peter Rowlands points out that

Lodge met Einstein in 1933 when the latter visited England. Naturally, he spoke with him about the ether. According to Lodge's notes of their conversation, Einstein said that he had gone through three stages with respect to the ether: first, a belief in the old dynamical theory; second, total disbelief; and finally, a belief that the ether is responsible for everything, through a disbelief that it has motion. (Rowlands, Oliver Lodge, 287)

Yeats, Autobiographies, 78.

^18. Yeats, Variorum Edition, 569.

^19. Yeats, “A General Introduction to My Work,” 581.

^20. Yeats, AVB, 253. Throughout this essay the abbreviation AVB indicates the second edition of A Vision from 1937, while AVA refers to the first edition of 1925. A Vision is not a single text: the two editions are so different as to add a further layer of complexity to an already complex system.

^21. Armstrong, “Ancient Frames,” 93.

^22. Ibid.

^23. Yeats, W.B. Yeats and T. Sturge Moore, 83.

^24. Armstrong, “Ancient Frames”, 95.

^25. Heisenberg quoted in Friedman, “Dissolving Surfaces,” 77.

^26. Yeats, AVB, 213.

^27. Yeats, “Bishop Berkeley,” Essays and Introductions, 401.

^28. Gibson, “‘What Empty Eyeballs Knew,’” 144.

^29. Both Yeats and Moore refer to these experimental proofs in the correspondence; for example, Moore writes that “Einstein's mathematical calculations were only accepted when definite predictions made on the strength of them were borne out by astronomical observations” (W.B. Yeats and T. Sturge Moore, 85).

^30. Ibid., 59.

^31. Ibid., 63. However, we should be aware that, as Katy Price recently reminded us, Russell based his The ABC of Relativity on one of Eddington's own public lectures: “Russell was happy to adopt key arguments found in the Romanes Lecture, weaving them into anecdotes that accorded with his own, rather different philosophical and political convictions” (Price, Loving Faster than Light, 104). In fact, at this point, the gap between Eddington and Russell wasn't as great as it appeared to Yeats and Sturge Moore.

^32. Eliot, Selected Essays, 371.

^33. Yeats, W.B. Yeats and T. Sturge Moore, 63.

^34. Ibid., 74.

^35. Ibid., 77.

^36. Eddington, “Domain of Physical Science,” 193.

^37. Ibid., 206.

^38. Ibid., 216.

^39. Yeats, W.B. Yeats and T. Sturge Moore, 59.

^40. Yeats, Collected Letters, 713–14.

^41. Ibid., 714.

^42. Yeats, W.B. Yeats and T. Sturge Moore, 89.

^43. Ibid., 97.

^44. Ibid., 99.

^45. Ibid., 124.

^46. Yeats, Collected Letters, 733–4.

^47. Yeats, Variorum Edition, 568–9.

^48. Yeats, W.B. Yeats and T. Sturge Moore, 122.

^49. Yeats, Collected Letters, 733–4.

^50. Foster, W.B. Yeats : A Life, 280.

^51. Gogarty quoted in ibid., note 106, 717.

^52. Yeats, AVA, 128.

^53. Yeats, AVB, 253.

^54. Bergson, The Creative Mind, 164–5.

^55. Gibson, “‘Timeless and Spaceless’?,” 117.

^56. Cited in Allen, Modernism, Ireland and Civil War, 78.

^57. Ibid.

^58. Yeats, AVB, 300.

^59. Yeats, Pages from a Diary (September 12), 40.

^60. Eddington, Space, Time and Gravitation, 201.

^61. Albright, Quantum Poetics, 75.

^62. Ibid.

^63. Russell, ABC of Relativity, 80.

^64. In searching for the shapeliness of Einstein's theory he is often more correct about it than other modernists; Einstein himself was always keen to emphasise that although relativity did away with many old assumptions, it was a coherent system in search of stable truths. The Einstein universe may be strange but, according to Einstein at least, it should not be chaotic.

^65. George Mills Harper, note to Yeats's A Critical Edition of Yeats's A Vision, 31.

^66. Although Einstein later decided that a cylinder would be more appropriate, so that the universe could be closed in the space dimensions, but open in the time dimension.

^67. Yeats, AVB, 202.

^68. Gibson, “‘Timeless and Spaceless’?,” 104–5.

^69. Jeans, Physics and Philosophy, 119.

^70. Yeats, Essays and Introductions, 402.

^71. Yeats, AVB, 81.

^72. Ibid., 25.

^73. Whitworth, Einstein's Wake, 131.

^74. Yeats, AVA, 8.