The early works of W. B. Yeats are mainly rose poems influenced by the symbolist movement and his other works reflect the poet’s consciousness absorbed in occultism and mysticism. And some of them are filled with confessions and revelations of love expressed in somewhat dreamlike and vague longing. These tendencies generally show unrefined sentimental contents and loosely woven poetic patterns. But, nevertheless, his early love lyrics effectively appeal to our emotion and have been popular and widely accepted. Those early erotic verses, especially based on the traditional Western culture of courtly love, attain the beloved’s love in literature as it is not achievable in reality. The tradition of the courtly love lyrics has passed down from Dante through Rossetti to Yeats. Following the poetic tradition, Yeats often implies that the beloved is absent, unattainable, or even dead. Therefore, Yeats’s early love lyrics generate their own love out of such absence and death. Love and death are mingled together in Yeats’s early love lyrics.

• 김재봉(동아대학교 조교수) | Chae-bong Kim