William Butler Yeats is widely considered to be one of the English language's greatest poets of the twentieth century. His work is informed by three major influences: his fierce dedication to the cause of Irish nationalism (he served as a senator from 1922 to 1928), the ancient mythology of his country, and his lifelong pursuit of mysticism and magickal practices, culminating in his association with the original Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an organization that combined European Cabalistic theory with astrological studies.

In his prophetic masterwork The Tower, Yeats conceived of the universe as being structured like intertwined cones, or "gyres", symbolizing the simultaneous raveling and unraveling of subjectivity and objectivity; when looked upon from above, these gyres appear as a single, unified circle. Yeats constructed a timeline for the history of humanity based on the 28 phases of the moon, represented by the circular form of the unified gyres, wherein the new and full moons indicated the beginning and ending of one cycle of the birth, evolution, and death of the human soul. Historically, the poet believed that each of these cycles was equivalent to the life of one great civilization and its prevailing myth, each cycle lasting for two thousand years. The current cycle, of course, began with the birth of Christ and ends around the year 2000. Yeats dubbed our contemporary era "the Second Coming", characterized by an apocalyptic cataclysm following mankind's descent into chaos. Just as the he viewed the history of the world as a series of repeating cycles, Yeats believed that the life and death of living creatures was a constantly repeating process of reincarnation. At the time of death, one's consciousness returned to what he called 'Anima Mundi", or the cosmic trance.

All of this cosmology only serves to better understand the depth and poignancy of a brilliant artist's work. Like William Blake before him, Yeats was driven to reach towards the vastest expanses of time, space, and knowledge, and the resonance of his vision is as powerful as these realms are infinite.

"O what of that, O what of that,