Author:

Abstract:

This paper analyzes Yeats’s poem “All Souls’ Night” (1920) in a close reading. Based on Melanie Klein’s distinction of the human being’s three basic drives (life, death and epistemological drive) it will look at how the three members of the Golden Dawn which are called up here (W.T. Horton, Florence Farr and MacGregor Mathers) each had their way of sublimating their drives. While the poet promises he has “a marvellous thing to say” this poem does not turn out to be a narrative but a performative one. As he tries to touch on the marvellous thing in each of the friends, it turns out to be their fascination with what’s difficult. After having shown how material and immaterial aspects of life are explored, inside and outside worlds brought in balance (or not), consciousness is left behind to let the unconscious reveal a Dantesque vision. Drawing on theories of Yeats’s Essays and Introductions, on Lacan’s notion of the “Real” and on Merleau-Ponty’s observations of the visible and the invisible this paper will throw a new light on Yeats’s particular style of conjuring realities.