When “She” Is Not Maud: An Esoteric Foundation and Subtext for Irish Folklore in the Works of W.B. Yeats

Even when Yeats sought exterior validation, his methods were sometimes rather slipshod. [...]in his excitement over finding apparent corroboration for what would become the central trope for A Vision (1925), his vision of "a naked woman of incredible beauty, standing upon a pedestal and shooting an arrow at a star", Yeats was blatantly duped by William Sharp (Yeats, Autobiographies 280; Yeats, Later Essays 14). Through the special blending of Irish and occult lore, Yeats could attain a subject matter both unique and of general validity. [...]his three interests [the literary, political, and philosophical] became - at least in his poetic theory and practice - unified, for his art was the expression (as Pater required) of his personality, the expression (as Irish nationalism demanded) of the Irish mind, and a method of buttressing and extending (as Blavatsky and [MacGregor] Mathers urged) the teachings of theosophy, Rosicrucianism, and cabalism. [...]fifteen years after formally resigning from active participation in the Stella Matutina (the schismatic successor of Mathers' original Golden Dawn), Yeats closed nearly two decades' work on A Vision with the lament: "It seems as if I should know all if I could but ... find everything in the symbol. [...]they take the supernatural events so much for granted that they seem advocates for Evans-Wentz's view in The FairlyFaith in Celtic Countries: "If fairies actually exist as invisible beings or intelligences, and our investigations lead us to the tentative hypothesis that they do, they are natural and not supernatural, for nothing that exists can be supernatural" (xxiv).