THE ESOTERIC THEORY OF W. B. YEATS’S “A VISION” IN THE POEM “THE SECOND COMING”

Abstract

The works of the 20th century Irish dramatist and poet W. B. Yeats were greatly influenced by his wife’s and his own automatic writings inspired by soul-communicators. It was thanks to those writings that the esoteric work entitled “A Vision” was created. Its theory serves as a key to the analysis of symbolism in Yeats’s later works. The paper examines the symbols and the main ideas of one of the most significant poems in Yeats’s works entitled “The Second Coming”. The latter is based on the metaphysical theory of “A Vision”.