In this paper, I argue that W. B. Yeats’s pursuit of universalism was rekindled by his rediscovery of the East through Tagore. Yeats’s political experiences during the 1910s also influenced his fascination with universalism. I will first discuss the significance of Yeats’s fascination with Tagore in relation to his rediscovery of the importance of East, particularly India, not only for spiritual reasons, but also for political reasons. That is, Tagore ultimately gave Yeats an opportunity to see India as a place to reconcile his split allegiance to both Romanticism and nationalism, and to art and politics. The East, for Yeats, is the place to swerve from his Romantic predecessors for political reasons. At this time, a return to East was especially important to him because it also offered a psychological vindication for his political setback—being attacked for his anti-nationalism—during the Playboy riots. That is, the pursuit of Eastern values, particularly Indian values, became his way of fighting colonialism, as well as for finding spiritual wholeness. By the time Yeats returned to the East, Yeats also began to witness the most turbulent and dramatic political events of his life such as the 1916 Easter Rising, the Irish and English War, and the Irish Civil War, which Yeats viewed as the culmination of the hatred between political groups and parties. His rediscovery of Eastern values through Tagore and his political experiences at that time slowly led Yeats to develop a concept of universalism: the unity of East and West. In other words, Yeats’s continuous movement towards universalism during this period was the necessary and inevitable course to deal with his political experiences: his psychological need to purify the bitterness and hatred Irish politics breeds into his mind, and his need to offer a more inclusive political vision to the Irish politicians who fight out of hatred of opposing parties. What Yeats basically wants to do by pursuing universalism is to create a citizen of the universe whose consciousness transcends the distinction between one and many, present and past, and East and West. Poems such as “The Double Vision of Michael Robartes,” “Sailing to Byzantium,” “Among School Children,” and “Byzantium,” written after 1919 express Yeats’s universalist idea of reconciling East and West employing a meditative scheme. It is unmistakable that all three poems encapsulate Yeats’s universal consciousness, but we also see that they are also tinged by Yeats’s skepticism about the transcendental state, as well as about universalism, in one way or another. Yeats’s doubt about universalism betrays his conflicting political agenda: his belief in the Anglo-Irish aristocratic government. Looking at other poems (“The Wild Swans at Cool,” “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory,” “An Irish Airman foresees his Death,” “A Prayer for my Daughter”) published in the same period reveal his covert allegiance to the Anglo-Irish aristocratic tradition.

• Yoo, Baekyun(Baekseok Culture University)