The aim of this study is to analyze Yeats’s first essay on Shelley, “The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry” and Shelley’s impact on Yeats. The essay was divided into two sections, “His Ruling Ideas” and “His Ruling Symbols.” In “His Ruling Ideas,” Yeats pays his attention to Shelley’s Intellectual Beauty which is the perception of beauty in thought and things. He began to write three early works on the search for love - The Seeker, The Island of Statues, and Mosada. In the nineties, particularly in The Rose poems, his study of Shelley impelled him toward an Intellectual vision of life in which he rejected the flawed world for an ideal vision of Intellectual Beauty. Later Yeats was to regret finding only Intellectual Beauty . He then reversed Shelley’s quest, and searched not to find the ideal, but to rediscover the actual. But when Yeats wrote the essay, he could not realize Shelley’s full gifts as a poet. In “His Ruling Symbols,” Yeats writes about the symbols of Shelley’s cave, river, tower, the Morning and Evening star, and Sun and Moon. The symbols of Shelley occur together and represent the ideal world which Yeats also wanted to achieve in the present world. In “The Gyres,” “Under Ben Bulben,” “The Phases of the Moon,” “The Tower,” “Blood and the Moon,” and “A Dialogue of Self and Soul” have verbal echoes of, or allusions to the Shelleyan passages that Yeats quotes. The relation between Shelley and Yeats deepens our appreciation of Yeats’ work. “Shelley,” he wrote, “shaped my life.”

• 서혜숙(건국대) | Suh, Hey Sook