The first of three Annual Yeats Lectures, led by Professor Warwick Gould.
The ‘Visions’ Notebook has no connection with Yeats’s much later theory of everything, A Vision of 1925 and 1937. It records his visions induced by meditation upon Irish and universal symbols, as well as his resultant dreams, at a time when he was collecting Irish folklore from the Galway peasantry, planning a Celtic Mystical Order with Maud Gonne - as ever at cross-purposes in love - and writing poems for The Wind Among the Reeds (1899).
Warwick Gould is a leading Yeats scholar, and since 1983 has edited the journal 'Yeats Annual'. An editor of Yeats’s Collected Letters and author of many articles on Yeats’s life and writings, he has edited (with Deirdre Toomey) Mythologies, Yeats’s early fiction and writings on folklore. He was Founder-Director (1999-2013) of the Institute of English Studies at the University of London, and in 2012 received the President’s Medal of the British Academy, for ‘signal service to the cause of the Humanities’.
