The Rhizome and the Flower - by James Olney (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

The Rhizome and the Flower: The Perennial Philosophy--Yeats and Jung offers an ambitious exploration of what its author terms "Yeats-and-Jung," a conceptual pairing examined not through conventional literary criticism or psychological analysis but through the broader framework of intellectual history and the "perennial philosophy." Rather than isolating Yeats's poetics, Jung's psychology, or the metaphysical traditions of the Pre-Socratics and Platonism, the study investigates the ways these traditions interpenetrate, revealing a shared set of ideas about imagination, archetype, and spiritual order that defy disciplinary boundaries. The book resists straightforward categorization, instead advancing an integrative reading of Yeats and Jung as participants in--and exemplars of--a much older philosophical and symbolic lineage.

The work proceeds through an extended intellectual genealogy, situating Yeats's symbolic system and Jung's theory of the collective unconscious in the long tradition of Western esotericism and metaphysical thought. In doing so, it makes the case that both figures embody aspects of the perennial philosophy, a vision of reality that recurs across cultural and historical contexts. Later chapters (7 and 8) focus directly on Yeats's poetics and Jung's psychology, yet the study insists that these cannot be fully understood apart from their shared philosophical heritage. For specialists in modernist studies, Jungian thought, or the history of ideas, *The Rhizome and the Flower* provides not a comparative exercise but a synthetic meditation on the cultural and intellectual currents that shaped--and were reshaped by--two of the twentieth century's most influential minds.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1980.