ABSTRACT
This chapter presents Yeats' sense of the growth and development of his own spirit, Ba. It focuses on to the ways in which these took on an increasingly Egyptian guise in his work, sometimes presented in an antithetical manner. The chapter looks in to the ways in which the poet dramatized his further encounters with Fate and sought to fully incorporate a total and uncompromising vision of the "One" into his artistic landscape. It shows how Yeats' developing system, realised fully in A Vision, would somewhat formalise his eclectic occult influences and theories and lead him into dialogue with the work of figures such as Hegel. The astonishing leap that appears to occur between the Yeats of Responsibilities and the Yeats who publishes the 1919 edition of The Wild Swans at Coole is partly accounted for in a complex maelstrom of biographical circumstances.
