Dobbs and the Tiger: The Yeatses’ Intimate Occult

Authors

  • Margaret Mills Harper University of Limerick

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-8026.2018v71n2p205

Abstract

The mediumistic relationship between W. B. Yeats and his wife George (née Hyde Lees) is an important guide to the creative work produced by the Irish poet after their marriage in 1917. Their unusual collaboration illuminates the esoteric philosophy expounded in the two very different versions of Yeats’s book A Vision (1925 and 1937). It is also theoretically interesting in itself, not only in the early period when the automatic experiments produced the ‘system’ expounded in A Vision, but also in the 1920s and 1930s, when the Yeatses' relationship had matured into an astonishingly productive mature partnership. By analysing symbols the Yeatses themselves used to conceive of their joint work, particularly the symbolic structures and constructed selves of the collaborators, and particularly in the later period, this essay attempts to engage with the authors’ own terminology and understanding as a method for reading their joint authorship.

Author Biography

Margaret Mills Harper, University of Limerick

Margaret Mills Harper is Glucksman Professor of Contemporary Writing in English at the University of Limerick. She specializes in Irish literature, literary modernisms, and poetry of the long twentieth century. Works include Wisdom of Two (Oxford), on the occult collaboration between W. B. Yeats and his wife George Hyde Lees, and The Aristocracy of Art (LSU), an examination of the autobiographical fictions of James Joyce and Thomas Wolfe. She is the co-editor of two volumes in the four-volume series Yeats’s “Vision” Papers (Macmillan). With Catherine Paul, she has edited both versions of Yeats’s A Vision (1925 and 1937) for The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats (Scribner).

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Published

2018-06-05

Issue

Vol. 71 No. 2 (2018): Artistic Collaborations

Section

Articles

License

Creative Commons Licence
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.