ABSTRACT
As Yeats makes clear at various points in On the Boiler, he is not unequivocally averse to the use of state power to advance the cause of "social welfare." To dream of social welfare in a materialistic sense is, he implies, to degrade the transformative power that dreams provide. In making the observation, however, author by no means seeking to absolve Yeats from complicity in the darkening intellectual climate of the European 1930s; his nationalist iterations became, and were intended to become, filaments in a transnational web of iterations—and reiterations—that stretched throughout Europe and beyond. The narrative of "Rosa Alchemica" reflects Yeats’s interest in arcane, gnostic practices—practices associated with what Thomas Whitaker describes as "the process whereby the evil of selfhood is explored, defined, and transcended." Yet even in John Sherman the networks of the world economy are shown to have already extended their filaments into rural Ireland—or, at least, into the rural Irish spaces inhabited by middle-class Protestants.
