Middle and Late Yeats: The Unlimited Expansion

In Poetic Knowledge in the Early Yeats, the critic Grossman suggests the poet’s ascription of universality to his poetic voice with a discussion of Yeats’ philosophies regarding the link between mind and object.

“The archetypal self-finding on which poetic knowledge is based arises, as we have pointed out, in a single experiment which Yeats never ceased repeating: the comparison of the imaginal content of mind as autonomous subject with the imaginal content of world as the object of mind and the origin of experience. The discovery to which this experiment leads is that images which arise in the individual consciousness are also images in the great resource of collective representation which constitutes historical culture. The last and absolute version of this assertion is that mind and world are symbolically identical.”

He discusses Yeats’ concept concerning object perception, suggesting that the similarity of the perception shared by different individuals of an object allows for the poetic assumption of poetic knowledge-- which he defines as the universal relevance of a concept. Because we ascribe the same significance to a given object, there could be a similarity in other perceptions we share. Grossman also suggests that the world’s existence and value can be attributed to our perceptions of it.

The link between perception and object is a concept very much related to yogic philosophy, in which one level of enlightenment occurs when a viewer is conscious of all aspects of an object’s relativity to the varying aspects of the universe. This state is referred to in a translation of Yoga Sutras I found in my bookcase the other day-- “In the state of Nirvicara Samadhi, an object is experienced in its full perspective, because in this state, knowledge is gained directly without the use of the senses.” In this state, the enlightened transcends the constraints of his own perceptions and achieves a more comprehensive awareness which involves the perception of a greater reality, as Yeats seemed to with his development of a unversal narrative during his career-- after beginning with one that focused on themes that were prevalent in the poet's own life.