
Wisdom of Two
The Spiritual and Literary Collaboration of George and W. B. Yeats
Margaret Mills Harper(Author)
Oxford University Press
Published on 15. June 2006
Book
Hardback
400 pages
978-0-19-928916-5 (ISBN)
Description
Georgie Hyde Lees, who married W. B. Yeats in the autumn of 1917, has for many years occupied a secondary or even marginal position in most studies of her famous husband. She has been depicted as a poor choice for romantic partner, political comrade, or literary collaborator. While often thanked in acknowledgments pages and regarded as a minor editor or secretary, she usually receives only footnote status in literary analyses. Most often, she has been cast as an amateur spirit medium or, less generously, as a manipulative perpetrator of an elaborate mystical and sexual hoax out of which arose Yeats's philosophical treatise A Vision and a raft of poetry, plays, and other literary works. Yet George Yeats co-wrote the automatic script and co-created the 'system' of cosmic geometry, based on a dialectics of desire. Coming to terms with the 'system' is vital to understanding the late work of the poet, yet a thorough critical study of the Yeatses' 'incredible experience' has never been written. Harper, one of few scholars who is intimately familiar with the large mass of documents, provides the first such study. She analyses the thousands of pages of published and unpublished papers, the particularities of their unusual composition, the finished literary works that depend upon them, and historical contexts such as the spiritualist movement, automatism (including its relation to communications technology), sexual politics, and war. Wisdom of Two airs critical and theoretical issues that are vital to understanding the Yeatses' spiritual, literary, and dramatic collaboration.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Oxford
United Kingdom
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
5 halftones
Dimensions
Height: 222 mm
Width: 145 mm
Thickness: 27 mm
Weight
694 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-19-928916-5 (9780199289165)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Margaret Mills Harper is Professor of English and Women's Studies at Georgia State University, Atlanta. She has written on Yeats, Joyce, Irish poetry, and the literature of the American South, as well as editing the Yeatses' "Vision" papers and A Vision.
Content
Introduction: 'She finds the words' ; 1. 'A philosophy ... created from search': Preliminary Issues ; First Interlude. Double Visions: Two Manuscripts and Two Books ; 2. Nemo the Interpreter ; Second Interlude. Automatic Performance: Technology and Occultism ; 3. 'to give you new images': Published Results ; 4. Demon the Medium ; 5. All The Others: Dramatis Personae ; Conclusion. 'this other Aquinas'