Yeats constantly sought to express in his poetry the images that he actually felt and experienced in the real world. The images in his poetry are the reflection of his dream and ideal, and they are “realities” of the real world transformed through his own imagination. In his early poetry, the images often tend to be illusory and mystical as they depend on materials of legends and myths. But in his middle period, the tendency to be illusory and mystical has gradually vanished, and his poems begin to become realistic, based on materials of common life. But, to me, this change, from the ideal to the real, is not dichotomous. For Yeats, Real and Ideal seemed to be inseparably related to each other under their mutual influence. That is, he sought the realization of Ideal while he didn’t forget Real in his own Ideal because he knew very well that forgetting his Real meant loosing his identity. Furthermore, his poetry shows a dialectical development that becomes a harmony of Real and Ideal by overcoming the conflict between them and by positively accepting the reality of the world. Finally, Yeats created a sublimated reality through internal conflicts of his Real and Ideal. Thus, this essay tries to show the change of reality in Yeats’ poems, which goes through a dialectical development, focusing on the relation between reality and imagination in his poetry.

• 차진석(한양대)