The purpose of this study is to research the relation between Yeats's imagination and the theme of old age, death, and after-life in Yeat's poetry. According to Heraclitus, cosmology is formed aspects of polarity, assuming 'living each other's death, dying each other's life.' The world is conceived as opposition and contradiction, and the human is dual in nature. this dualistic conflict of consciousness has become a basic starting point of his imagination. Yeats recognized the dualistic conflict was an energy of a creative mind and a characteristic of human nature. It brought about the struggle between inner world and outer world. This struggle begins with assuming an individual's anti-self opposed to his primary self. To him, the conflict or struggle, endowed with the meaning of human being existence, is the seed of being of unity. "An Acre of Grass," dealing with the theme of old age, Yeats saw the tragic reality as positive. In spite of decrepitude and quiescence, Yeats said 'Grant me an old man's frenzy, / myself must I remake.' In Yeats's case, great are art is not merely created out of the conjunction of the artist's mind and external world, but rather out of the artist's denial of his primary self and recreation of his mask, the true image of his antithetical self and a fragment of the Anima Mundi. In recreating this fragment he actually creates a higher order of reality than the visible world possesses. Yeats conceive death and life are not divided but connected in "Tower", and "Mohini Chatterjee" as accepting positively human tragic condition. Yeats said that the wheel or cone of the Faculties may be considered to complete its movement between birth and death, that of the Principles to include the period between lives as well in A Vision. In "Byzantium", Yeats deals with the after-life in the view of Four Principles as seeing the soul after death as living reality. To Yeats, the phenomenon of violence, hatred or passion in this world is prerequisite to reincarnation, a creation of other self or true self. After getting rebirth, Yeats tried to reach profane perfection. Looking out over the whole of human life, and its prevailing desolation, he tried to find the proper response to life and suffering in terms of gaiety. Yeats's final response to the old age and death here is no longer the horror, but he accepts the old age and death as the pain of human being with tragic joy through his unique imagination.

• 신현호(천안대) | Hyun-Ho Shin