A Vision by William Butler Yeats
Published 1925 · 75,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Nonfiction, Philosophy, Occult & Esoterica, Poetry Criticism
How hard is A Vision to read?
A Vision scores 71 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 78 out of 100
- Yeats coins a private technical vocabulary — Daimon, Husk, Passionate Body, Celestial Body, the Faculties (Will, Mask, Creative Mind, Body of Fate), the tinctures — none of which carry their ordinary dictionary meanings. Readers must learn an entire occult lexicon from scratch, closer to Gravity's Rainbow's jargon-density than to conventional philosophical prose.
- Sentence structure: 60 out of 100
- Yeats writes in measured, essayistic sentences rather than Jamesian hypotaxis — clauses pile up to define terms and cross-reference diagrams rather than to embed subordinate thought. The difficulty is conceptual more than grammatical, putting it below Proust or Absalom, Absalom! but above plain expository prose.
- Abstraction: 87 out of 100
- The book is almost pure system: gyres, cones, and moon-phases stand in for history and personality with minimal grounding in concrete event or character. It sits near The Waste Land's abstraction rather than Brothers Karamazov's dramatized philosophy, since the diagrams themselves are the content.
- Information density: 80 out of 100
- Twenty-eight phases of the moon, four Faculties, two thousand-year gyres, and historical correspondences going back to Leda and forward to a coming avatar are all held in play simultaneously, closer to War and Peace's plot-density than to Gatsby's compression, except every element here is schematic rather than narrative.
How A Vision is regarded
A Vision holds a literary regard score of 59 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.