Imagination is an important instrument in a poet’s creation. Imagination is sometimes said to be derived from the longing and desire for the absent objects. Therefore the dynamic imagination, necessary for creating good poems, can be sustained by the opposition and conflict between dualistic worlds such as the ideal and the realistic, eternity and time. But sometimes poets are tempted to be absorbed into abstract imagination with which they can escape into supernatural world while ignoring the real world. This abstract imagination can be called the limits of imagination. This paper is aimed at studying how abstract imagination worked in W. B. Yeats’s early poems and what kind of poetic world he reached after overcoming the limits of his imagination. In his early poems, unrealistic and ideal perfection was sought as a result of his self which was too weak and feeble to accept the painful world. As a reflection of his weak self, unrealistic images distant from here and now, such as legendary heroes, fairies and the eternal rose, were used in his early poems and created an eternal world into which he could escape from the real. But as his self developed and changed into a more mature and harder state, he was able to accept and overcome the despair and tragedy caused in his actual world. In his later period his self developed and intensified enough to accept even death as his natural destiny, and to remake himself and the world with his creative mind, with which he could overcome the limits of imagination. Finally after overcoming the limits of his imagination, he attained a state of wisdom called ‘tragic gaiety’. Tragic gaiety is a kind of vision in which Yeats was able to embody eternity in the temporal world.

• 조동열(조선대) | Cho Dong-yul