ABSTRACT
When Yeats's "instructors" visited him in 1917, they brought a highly complex and
elusive mythology that as a "stylistic arrangement of experience" or "system" often seems
more to obfuscate than elucidate human experience. To Yeats, however, his instructors
brought very real solutions to the problems that for years had beset him, and ironically,
Shelley returned in the company of beings whose existence he would have questioned and
whose purpose he would have deplored. The dogma of A Vision would have run counter
Yeats the scheme of A Vision seemed to resolve the troubling paradoxes of his early
poetry. At last the relationship between the imagination and reality, death and timelessness,
individual experience and the course of history could be ascertained, and Yeats, with the
help of his system, could believe in the power of poetry and the poet. Yeats joined Shelley
in his claims for the imagination as he fought the skepticism that lay at the core of all
Shelley's beliefs.
