Yeats’s imagination is filled with the deliberate efforts and will to transform the given reality and self. Influenced by William Blake’s visionary or symbolic imagination who had pursued the eternal essence of life, Yeats sought for the perfect and beautiful as the goal which human beings should try to reach. In ‘Adam’s Curse,’ he asserts, since the Fall, there are nothing perfect and beautiful without one’s deliberate labour to reach them. A good poem necessarily needs lots of repeated correction, “stitching and unstitching,” but finally if it doesn’t seem natural like “a moment’s thought,” all the efforts and labour which have been made comes to be futile. In that the naturalness in poems through laborious process is emphasized, it can be said that his poetics would seek to the perfect and the refined, in content and expression, but most of all his great concern is on one’s passion and the laborious process to transform the reality as it is through imagination. This paper aims to explore the achievement of Yeats’s transformative imagination acted on the idealization of Anglo-Irish aristocratic tradition and nationality in terms of the discourse of nationalism. He projects onto Anglo-Irish aristocratic class the intellectual leadership over the crowd and the organic continuity and tradition which Irish middle class, that he hates, is regarded to lack. Under the threat and violence of Irish Catholics who began to make claims to their rights on dispossessed land, the Anglo-Irish, who had enjoyed the power and wealth since the 17th century, were forced to feel crisis. The Anglo-Irish were destined to play no more active roles in the following Irish history and would be in danger of isolation. Thus his idealization of the Anglo-Irish was constituted where his desire and fear meet. Here Yeats’s idealization of Anglo-Irish aristocrat was made retrospectively in the crisis. The Gregorys’ Coole House and Yeats’s tower, Thoor Ballylee are representative symbols in which he idealized the Anglo-Irish culture and its heroic tradition. The sense of form which Yeats found in the architectural form of Coole House as well as “courtesy” and “ceremony” in aristocrat’s life is one of the heroic ideals Yeats pursued throughout all his life. In poems dealing with this theme, we can see that he idealizes the Anglo-Irish culture and tradition by giving them the idealized heroic values such as the recklessness, intellect and courtesy, criticizing the rigid mind and snobbism of native middle class people who is indifferent to one’s spiritual value and imagination. This is the discourse of nationalism which insists on one’s nation’s innocent, continuous and self-sufficient attributes and proves its superiority to other nations. They would hide the fact that it is invented or constituted by purpose, assuming naturalness and making national myth a self-evident fact through various cultural discourses. But Yeats’s transformative imagination, as seen in ‘Adam’s Curse,’ puts great emphasis on one’s labour made behind to reach the ideal and the opposite to the reality, he lays bare his deliberate efforts of idealizing, not making natural by hiding and mystifying it. Here his poetry comes out of the typical discourse of nation. Like the Anglo-Irish ancestors who founded the magnificent house dreaming the ideal, Yeats himself who wrote a poem in the crisis of breakdown of the Anglo-Irish nationality by historical change and violence wanted to be memorized to his heir as a founder, “befitting the emblem of adversity.” In ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War,’ and ‘Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931,’ we can see that he makes the myth of Anglo-Irish nationality and at the same time demystifies or deconstructs it by showing that it is invented.

• Meejung Park(한국외국어대학교) | 박미정