This article touches upon Yeats’s relationship to the spiritual traditions of the world in the 1930's. During this period when he was immersed in Eastern, especially Indian philosophies, Yeats affirmed his desire to pursue the marriage of East and West for political and psychological reasons. An analysis of the poems from A Full Moon in March (1935) reveals that Yeats believes that the idea of the East-West marriage works as an antidote to the persistent political problems of Ireland -- the battle between Catholics and Protestants -- which again haunted Ireland after de Valera became the president of Ireland in 1932. Yeats’s Supernatural Songs is a testimony to his ideal of wholeness which he expresses through his pernona-hermit Ribh. Yeats’s attempt to reconcile the conflicting forces of East and West (evolved from Catholics and Protestants) reflects the poet’s Romantic ideals so that the East and the West (the colonized and the colonizer) co-exist harmoniously by discarding one’s own weaknesses and accepting the other’s merits. His life-long efforts to pursue the political unity of his country and the world also show his practical character in that he is always thinking about the possibility of maximizing the potential of each component of a group. We, however, also see that Yeats is not completely free from his Protestant prejudice even when he strongly urges the unity between two opposing political parties by making a subtle connection between a religious hermit and Parnell. It is no wonder that Supernatural Songs also has poems which express Yeats’s skepticism about the possibility of conveying the idea of oneness to the everyday world, as well as his resistance to the mystical concept of oneness.

• 유배균(건국대) | Yoo, Baekyun