Olney, James. The Rhizome and the Flower. The Perennial Philosophy—Yeats and Jung.: Berkeley, University of California Press, 1980. Pp. xv. 379. £12.

Although there is a copy of A Vision by Yeats in the library at Küsnacht, Jung stated on one occasion: ‘I have never read a line of his’. Equally, Yeats's library contained one volume of Jung, but the poet makes no reference to it in any published work. As far as is known, the two men never met. Yet their main philosophic concepts, when systematically compared, reveal astonishing parallels; often their quoted statements echo each other strangely. For one, ‘Conscious and unconscious are united just as a waterfall connects above and below’; the other muses: ‘I am awake and asleep at my moments of self-revelation, self-possessed in self-surrender’. For Jung, ‘the unconscious corresponds to the mythic land of the dead, the land of the ancestors’, while for Yeats:

In this study James Olney explores with impressive scholarship and poetic insight not merely the striking resemblances between the systems of thought created by two remarkable men, but also the undying, invisible rhizome from which they derive—an historical tradition of immeasurable antiquity, shaped largely by Plato from the ideas of his great precursors, but with psychic roots sunk deeper still in an unfathomable past, Jung's ‘birth-place of thought forms’, Yeats's ‘fibrous darkness’. Here we have the creative matrix which gives rise to primordial images—those basic configurations and bold archaic patterns which the poet acknowledged when he wrote: ‘I can but see bird and woman blotting out some corner of the Babylonian mathematical starlight’, and which Jung, describing the archetypes, called ‘deposits of the constantly rejected experiences of humanity’.

It is a test of the author's balance that he moves at ease in this obscure but fertile area, culling Yeatsian ‘mummy wheat’, yet also presenting in an organised and lucid way those philosophic systems with which the thin