Autore
Antonielli, Arianna

Titolo
Reveries, Visions and Obsessions: Tracking Mental Disease in Yeats’s Rosa Alchemica
Periodico
Textus
Anno: 2024 - Fascicolo: 3 - Pagina iniziale: 199 - Pagina finale: 222

W.B. Yeats was a scholar of Western and Eastern religions and esoteric doctrines; as such, he was profoundly interested in the intersection between medicine and alchemy. Throughout his writings, he constantly interwove the imagery and symbolism from these domains. For Yeats, alchemy was both a scientific-artistic pursuit and a means towards understanding the human psyche. In Yeats’s vision on medicine and alchemy as metaphors for healing and transformation, mental illness serves as a central motif and as the initial situation of that inner conflict to be healed, the boundary between reason and mysticism. In his early works, madness represents a recurring theme, as shown particularly by the short story Rosa Alchemica. This essay analyses the role of mental disease in this short piece of prose writing, manifested as a vision so powerful as to leave its protagonist shaken and bewildered, and highlights its connections with the alchemical process of transformation and progression.



SICI: 1824-3967(2024)3<199:RVAOTM>2.0.ZU;2-3
Testo completo: https://www.rivisteweb.it/download/article/10.7370/115629
Testo completo alternativo: https://www.rivisteweb.it/doi/10.7370/115629

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