이 논문은 예이츠부부가 결혼 초기에 실시했던 자동기술의 상당부분이 매우 개인적이며 성적인 내용으로 이루어져 있는 점에 주목하면서, 그러한 성적인 내용들이 자동기술에 어떻게 표현되어 있으며, 그것들은 자동기술에 표현되어 있는 철학적이고 종교적인 내용들과 어떤 관련성을 갖고 있는가, 또한 자동기술이 『비전』으로 엮어지는 과정에서 그러한 사적이고 성적인 내용들이 감추어지게 된 이유는 무엇이며, 그것들은 예이츠의 삶과 시에 어떤 영향을 주게 되는가에 대해 살피고 있다.

This paper is an attempt to understand George Yeats: who she was, how she lived, and what kind of relationship she had with the poet W. B. Yeats. Based on the recent biographical and critical studies of Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, Brenda Maddox, Ann Saddlemyer, and Margaret Mills Harper, the present writer tries to show that George Yeats was not only the devoted wife of W. B. Yeats and mother of their two children, but also the poet's literary and spiritual collaborator. The first introductory part of the paper deals with George Yeats's life until she married W. B. Yeats. Her birth and education, the first meeting with W. B. Yeats, and the establishing of a close relationship which, strengthened by common interest in occultism, led to their marriage in October 1917, are briefly surveyed. The paper then discusses the problem which arose from Yeats's unresolved sexual love for Iseult Gonne, and shows how George Yeats solved it by trying the automatic script at their honeymoon hotel. The automatic script, which saved George and W. B. Yeats at the critical moment, and dominated the early years of their married life, is mainly discussed in the next part of the paper. The paper first describes how it started, and then discusses the main issues related to it: why George did it, and whether it was "her hoax, a joint self-deception, or daimonic intervention" (Saddlemye xix), and how it affected W. B. Yeats's life and work. In order to see how W. B. Yeats expressed his feeling and thought about the automatic script in his poems, the writer of the paper reads "Solomon to Sheba," "Solomon and the Witch," and "The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid." The last part of the paper deals with George Yeats's life after the automatic script and the "sleeps" ended in summer 1922. Unlike the exciting and sexually intimate life of early five years, the later long years of her married life were very tiring and "problem-ridden." The paper discusses the major problems she had to face as wife of the great poet and mother of two children, and describes how she "lived through it with self-possession, with generosity, with something like nobility" (Elllmann xxviii).

This paper is an attempt to read Yeats's poetry in terms of postcolonialism. Drawing on the recent studies of Yeats and Irish literature, performed by such critics and scholars as Edward Said, David Lloyd, Declan Kiberd, and Jahan Ramazani, the paper examines the various aspects of Yeats as a postcolonial poet. The fist part of the paper deals with the problems that we might encounter when we try to define the postcoloniality of Ireland, which is, in Luke Gibbons's words, "a First World country, but with a Third World memory." There also might be some difficulty in deciding when the postcolonial literature in English began in Ireland. Considering these problems and difficulties, the present writer understands the term "postcolonial" as "anticolonial" rather than "postindependence" or "since colonization," and discusses Yeats's poems which reveal the poet's anticolonial attitude toward England. The next main part of the paper begins by proposing "hybridity" as a feature of postcolonial literature in general. It is assumed that the concept of hybridity can provide the most appropriate and efficient way of understanding the true nature of Yeats's postcoloniality. In this respect, the poet's familial background as an Anglo-Irish Protestant, his complex relationships with the English poets, especially Spenser and Shakespeare, and his use of the English language are discussed. Lastly, in order to see postcolonial hybridity in the specific poetic forms of Yeats's poetry, this paper discusses the use of place names and mythologies, both Irish and non-Irish, in his poems, as an anticolonial and hybridizing gesture. The paper also discusses some aspects of Yeats's poetic style, such as the lyrical form, poetic diction, and images and symbols, and shows how he hybridizes the poetic style which he inherited from the English poetic tradition.

The Tower, published in 1928, is Yeats's finest single volume of poetry, and it might also be the finest single book of poems published in the twentieth century (O'Donnell 89). Many poems of the volume confront the problems of growing old. This paper attempts to read three poems selected from The Tower--"Sailing to Byzantium," "The Tower," and "Among School Children"--in terms of their representations of old age and its relation to desire and the imagination. In "Sailing to Byzantium," the poet begins by declaring that Ireland is "no country for old men." He complains that here all are "caught in that sensual music" and "neglect monuments of unageing intellect." "The Tower" also begins with the poet's confused question: "What shall I do with this absurdity . . . this caricature, decrepit age?" He complains about his old age because it makes his body "a sort of battered kettle at the heel," and that body can deride his imagination and its work. The poet's complaint or anxiety about old age in these poems comes from the fact that his old age and bodily decrepitude make it hard to satisfy his desire. In "Sailing to Byzantium," lack of satisfaction makes him unhappy in Ireland and wish to leave. Also in "The Tower," unsatisfied desire makes his heart "troubled," and so he is even tempted to give up poetry and choose philosophy. However, ironically enough, unsatisfied desire makes his imagination stronger than ever. Now, in spite of his bodily decrepitude, his imagination enables him to travel to the "holy city" of Byzantium, and there pray to the sages there that he may be changed into a golden bird, "an artifice of eternity." In "The Tower," the poet sends his imagination forth and calls "images and memories" to ask questions of them. In the process of calling images and asking questions, the poet restores his belief in the power of the imagination, and, because of this belief, he can leave his "pride" and "faith" as poet to the "young upstanding men" of Ireland. "Among School Children" confronts the problem of physical ageing a little differently. The poem shows the poet walking through the schoolroom and dreaming of "a Ledaean body" (Maud Gonne). His imagining her as a child and then thinking of "her present image" leads to the meditation not only on the general human fate of ageing but also on the images which "break hearts" because they do not touch the reality of life. Not only the passage of time but also the false images make human life exhausted and unhappy. To solve the problem, the poet's imagination creates two images of unified being: the "blossoming" tree and the "dancing" body. Where life is blossoming or dancing, the poet says, "The body is not bruised to pleasure soul." What he is trying to say is that life is an ongoing process, and so we must accept it as it really is.

This paper is an attempt to read “Easter 1916,” one of W. B. Yeats's best-known political poems, in terms of its representation of women and the related politics of sexuality. In the second stanza of the poem where the poet describes four rebels of the Easter Rising, he shows Countess Constance Markievicz. the woman whom Yeats knew so well from his childhood in Sligo. Besides her, the writer of this paper proposes the possibility of reading other two woman images in the poem: Maud Gonne and Cathleen ni Houlihan. By discussing these described or suggested images of women, this paper tries to show that they represent the "terrible beauty" which the poet says the rebels of the Easter Rising have generated.The first woman this paper chooses for discussion is Countess Markievicz. The poet describes her mainly as a woman whose "voice grew shrill" because of her spending "nights in argument," and then compares her present shrill voice with the "sweet" voice she had when she was "young and beautiful." In order to understand the intent of the poet's emphasis on Countess Markievicz's "shrill" voice, the present writer reads one passage from Yeats's journal, where he regards "the shrillness" of voices of "the political class in Ireland" as the result of "the cultivation of hatred as one energy of their movement." In another similar passage, Yeats relates this hatred to "the sexual abstinence, so common among young men and women in Ireland." Based on this reading of Yeats's prose passages, this paper concludes that Countess Markievicz's shrill voice reveals her hatred and her negative attitude to sexual matters. The next part of the paper deals with two women characters, Maud Gonne and Cathleen ni Houlihan. Although she does not appear in the poem, Maud Gonne is suggested in the poem by her similarity to Countess Markievicz and by the poet's mentioning of her husband John MacBride. To support the presence and importance of Maud Gonne in the poem, the writer of this paper briefly reads two poems of Yeats--"A Prayer for My Daughter" and "Among School Children"--where he describes her in a very similar way to the description of Countess Markievicz in "Easter 1916." Another woman, Cathleen ni Houlihan, is also suggested in the poem, because, in terms of symbolic images, she seems to have led the rebels to the battlefield of the rising. This paper reads Yeats's play Cathleen ni Houlihan to show that she also can be understood in this poem in a negative way: she symbolizes the hatred and its resultant sexual abstinence of the rebels. In this way, like Countess Markievicz and Maud Gonne, she can represent the "terrible beauty" of the Easter Rising. Lastly, this paper considers another image of woman which appears in the last and fourth stanza, where the poet ends the poem by naming the rebels "As a mother names her child / Where sleep at last has come / On limbs that had run wild." The writer of the paper thinks that the poet needs this image of mother to mitigate his critique of the rebels which he has done in the third stanza, especially by using the image of stone. By becoming a real mother himself, unlike another "terrible" mother of Ireland, Cathleen ni Houlihan, the poet can arrive at a reconciled and balanced position, and accept the rebels in their contradictory and tragic state.

Aiming to understand the poetry of W. B. Yeats in terms of gender, sexuality, and politics, this paper reads some major poems of his early years. The first part of the paper reads the poems in which the masculine world of war, science, and political power is negated in favor of the feminine world of nature, poetry, and wisdom. The present writer of the paper considers that the femininity of these poems, expressed in the pastoral world of the shepherd, or the stories of Irish legendary King Goll, Fergus, and the fairyland, comes from Yeats's poetic attempt to surmount the British imperial and materialistic world by enhancing the Irish cultural traditions and values. The next part reads a group of poems which deal with Yeats's love of Maud Gonne. Using the image of the rose or the courtly genre, both of them being old traditional poetic conventions, the poet represents Maud Gonne either as a goddess of eternal beauty or a woman of heroic nobility. However, she is also represented as a woman of "lonely face" and "pilgrim soul," a woman who brings "the sorrow of love," or a woman repeatedly associated with the tragic world of Troy. This ambivalence or double vision in the poet's representation of her seems to result form Yeats's ambiguous attitude to Maud Gonne and her revolutionary and social work. The last part of the paper deals with two poems and a play which represent Ireland as a woman. The use of a woman figure as symbolic image of Ireland, especially Yeats's use of Cathleen ni Houlihan in his poetry and drama, is important, because it most distinctively reveals the relations between sexual politics and aesthetic value in the early poetry of Yeats. In this respect, the writer of this paper notes that the woman figure in these works is a highly romanticized and idealized one, rather than a real one with human body and sexual desire, and thinks that this is related to Yeats's version of Iriish nationalism with its strengths and limitations.

“Politics,” the last of W. B. Yeats’s Collected Poems (Richard Finneran’s New Edition), ends with the poet's wish for fulfillment of sexual desire and love: “But O that I were young again / And held her in my arms.” Yeats wrote this poem in May 1938, eight months before his death. In another poem, “A Prayer for Old Age,” written in 1934, the poet prays that he “may seem . . . A foolish, passionate man.” In these and other poems of Yeats’s last years, “lust and rage” really seem to “dance attendance upon [his] old age” and “spur [him] into song” (“The Spur”). This paper is an attempt to understand the last years of Yeats’s life and poetry in terms of sexuality and love. The first part of this paper discusses the Steinach operation which Yeats underwent in 1934, when he was 68 years old. Although it is uncertain that the operation had brought the poet the expected “second puberty,” it seems to have had an psychologically positive effect upon his writing of poetry. During the last five years after the operation, Yeats wrote almost fifty poems, which is surprising number considering his old age and precarious health. In this part of the paper, the present writer reads some poems in which the poet's feeling and thought about sexuality and love in these final years of his life are most clearly expressed: “A Prayer for Old Age,” “The Spur,” “The Wild Old Wicked Man,” and the sequence of “Supernatural Songs.” After the operation Yeats met Margot Ruddock, Dorothy Wellesley, Ethel Mannin, and Edith Shackleton Heald, all of them being young, pretty, and intelligent women. They were poets (Ruddock and Wellesley), a novelist (Mannin), and a journalist (Heald). The second part of this paper deals with the poet’s meetings with these women, and reads the poems which are based upon, and reveal the nature of, their relations: “Margot,” “Sweet Dancer,” “A Crazed Girl,” “To Dorothy Wellesley,” and “The Three Bushes.”

Crazy Jane is the name of the woman speaker in a sequence of poems which Yeats wrote in the years from 1929 to 1931, and are collected in “Words for Music Perhaps” section of The Winding Stair and Other Poems. Her words and deeds in the poems show that she is a very interesting and impressive woman. This paper is an attempt to understand this “crazy,” old, and wild woman, and to relate her to Yeats the poet and to Ireland. The first and introductory part of the paper begins by reading “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop,” the most famous poem of the Crazy Jane sequence. In Jane's talk with the bishop in this poem, not only in what she says, but also in the manner of her speech, we can quite clearly see what kind of person she is, and what kind of life she is living. Such understanding prepares us for the reading of the whole poems in the next part. Finding many of the poems difficult to understand, and interpretations of them different from critic to critic, the present writer tries to read the poems as closely as possible. Based upon the close reading of the poems in the second part, the third and last part of this paper considers some aspects of Crazy Jane’s personality and life, and their implications to Yeats and Ireland. First, the paper considers the possibility that Jane's free and bold expression of her sexual desire and love in the poems can be understood as the awareness and affirmation of feminine sexuality and love, and the critique of the repressive sexual morality and culture of the Irish society, especially the Catholic Church. Next, this paper relates Crazy Jane to Yeats the poet and to Ireland, and discusses the ways in which she can be read as Yeats’s other self or mask, or as the image of Ireland.

To Yeats, as Mario Praz remarks in The Romantic Agony, sex was “the mainspring of works of imagination”(vx). This paper is an attempt to read Yeats’s “A Woman Young and Old” in terms of poetic representations of feminine sexuality and gender. All written in years 1929 through 1931, the sequence of eleven poems deal with the problems of female body and desire in a repressive patriarchal society. The first and introductory part of the paper briefly surveys the social and cultural background of the poems. The centrality of the subject of feminine sexuality and gender in these poems shows that Yeats saw the social and cultural repression of women and their sexual desire as one of the serious and urgent problems facing Ireland at that time. In Ireland of the 1920s, where the new national frame was being created under the hegemony of the Catholic Church and the middle class, the general attitude toward the women’s position and role and their sexual expression was very conservative and repressive. The main part of the paper closely reads the poems of the sequence, from “Father and Child” in which a daughter boldly asserts sexual freedom in defiance of her father’s opposition and criticism, to “From the ‘Antigone’” which shows another daughter defying the authority of king for the sake of filial love and the freedom of conscience. In reading the poems, this paper tries to show how Yeats’s awareness and affirmation of the female body and desire is expressed in his criticism of the repressive sexual morality and culture of the Irish society, especially the Catholic Church. In opposition to that sexually repressive and ascetic culture, he shows women’s body and sexual desire in such a bold and affirmative way that the poetic expression itself turns out to be an effective critique of that culture.

Based on the assumption that Maud Gonne was one of the most important persons in Yeats’s life and art, this paper is an attempt to understand the “labyrinthine” nature of their complex relationship. However, the present writer is not trying to dig into their lives for the specific facts which might be used to support his argument; rather, he is trying to read some of Yeats’s poems in such a way to illuminate his relation to Gonne. That is, through the close reading of related poems, the present writer examines how Gonne is thematically and formally represented in Yeats’s poems, how the representations change through the years of his life, and how they are related to other aspects of his poetry. The first introductory part of this paper very briefly surveys the life of Gonne, how her relationship with Yeats began and continued, and how she influenced him in writing his poems. Although it is true that she brought into his life “an overpowering tumult,” it is also true that between fifty and sixty of Yeats’s poems were created in the wake of their relationship. The main part of the paper analyzes Yeats’s poems chosen from his early, middle and late period of life. Some poems, such as “The Sorrow of Love,” “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven,” “Adam’s Curse,” “No Second Troy,” “The Cold Heaven,” “A Prayer for my Daughter,” “Among School Children” are more closely and thoroughly read than others. In reading the poems, this paper tries to show how the poet’s representations of Gonne in the poems reveal not only the actual situations of their relationship at the moment of their writing but also the aesthetic and political ideologies of the poet himself at that moment.

This paper is an attempt to examine the political aspects of Yeats's plays, and, for that purpose, four of his major plays are selected and analyzed: The Countess Cathleen, Cathleen ni Houlihan, The Dreaming of the Bones and Purgatory. In the introductory part, the present writer briefly surveys the ways how Yeats, finding in drama an effective means of achieving the unity of culture for Ireland, dedicated himself to the dramatic movement and related activities. The next and main part of the paper examines the selected plays, paying attention to the political themes and the other political elements specifically revealed in these plays. The early two plays, The Countess Cathleen and Cathleen ni Houlihan, show the rare and sublime cases of sacrifice and devotion directed toward the cause of Irish independence and wellbeing by creating two characters, an aristocratic lady who sacrifices her life and soul to save the starving peasants and a young man who rushes to the heroic death for Irish independence leaving behind his new bride and home. While The Dreaming of the Bones asks the political and historical meaning of the two most important events in Irish history: the Diarmuid and Dervorgilla episode of the 12th century and the EasterRising of 1916, Purgatory deals with the political and social implications of the destruction of an honored house caused by mesalliance. To the extent that both of these middle and late plays end in a tragic note of unforgiving bitterness and hatred, they can be regarded as the aesthetic expression of the real political and cultural situations of Irish society at the time of their writing. What this paper is trying to say as a conclusion is that the four plays discussed here reveal the political and ideological positions of Yeats as they developed in his early, middle and late years of life. In other words, they reveal the specific ways in which Yeats as an Anglo-Irish poet and playwright tried to solve the problems and contradictions he faced in the changing political and social situations of Ireland.