Poets, astrologers and mindful sweeping Dragged my butt to the quack - who was in a cheery mood, told me there was a lot of it about, and gave me antibiotics to cure The Ears, which are painfully bunged up and howling with tinnitus. My brain is working a bit better however. I printed out my poems and shuffled them about, although I am finding it hard to see the wood for the trees. I also read some Yeats, and Ted Hughes - and quite enjoyed this. As someone who briefly, and not lucratively, cast people's astrological birth charts for a living, I am interested in how astrology has influenced poetry. W.B. Yeats was of course interested in all things occult. For example on honeymoon he forced his wife Georgie to conduct bouts of automatic writing: to go into trances and channel spirits and write down what they said. Bizarrely, the results were used as source material for a book of occult systems called A Vision . A Vision's systems are essentially quite astrological. There are house...