Vize

This book of symbolic prose by Irish writer and 1923 Nobel Prize winner in Literature William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) finds the unity of historical epochs, major periods of human life and character types in the cycle of the moon phases. The book was intended to be a summation of the author's knowledge, along the lines of Pound's Cantos, and is a source of Yeats's most compelling symbols from his late creative period. Yeats devoted nearly fifteen years of his life to The Vision, and continued to edit and add to the first version of 1924 until 1931. His poetic output, however, did not suffer in the slightest, and his late collections of poems, The Tower and The Winding Stair of 1928 and 1933, are rightly regarded as its high point. The Vision (first published in 1937), however, is not merely an interpretation of the author's esoteric system. It also contains autobiographical passages in which the author explains the genesis of the book, and no small part of its creation was Yeats's wife, Bertha Georgie, the medium and facilitator of the automatic writing that forms the basic images and metaphors of this extraordinary work.

Czech edition