William Butler Yeats uses objective logos and subjective lego to transvalue conventional philosophy and religion for poetic truth and reality throughout his poems. Because of the transumptive power of the poetry, Yeats highly poeticizes apocalyptic vision which makes his poetry unite reality with imagination, nature with human beings, life with art, logic with mystery, humanity with divinity, and history with literature. In this sense, the poet explores the apocalyptic possibilities of poetry through the poetic revitalization of logos and lego in the spiritual world. Since logos and lego are used variously in classic literature, a coherent conception of logos and lego should be defined clearly for this study. In its popular view, logos denotes objective words which have factual basis. However, lego means subjective and personally interpretative words based upon logos. This sense of logos and lego suggest no judgment on the truth of the things. The notion of logos is alluded to frequently in poetic passages, particularly in prophetic texts of Yeats’s poetry. In this sense, the ancients view a poet as a prophet who realizes supernatural will, reveals new truth, foretells the coming age, and charges a possible preparation through the words of apocalyptic poetry. Thus, Yeatsian lego presents a legitimate expression of the human mind, and opens the door to self-justficaton. This conception of logos and lego includes a priori intuition in our beliefs and consciousness. Therefore, Yeats conceptualizes this sense of logos and lego throughout his apocalyptic poetry.
The tradition of local landscape poetry in England has appeared since the 18th century, and has been enhanced as one of the main characteristics of the 19th century European poetry and inherited until today. The landscape, in general, plays three roles: first, it is used as the background and a medium with which to express a poet’s emotion and mind; secondly, it can reveal its role as a subject, making dialogue with a poet; and thirdly, it can be used as a reminder of collective mind. Yeats and Heaney, unlike the English poets, show strong aesthetical and collective mind, even in describing the landscape. However, Yeats, belonging to Protestant Ascendancy, used the landscape as a medium to express his individualistic emotion and to stir the Romantic Ireland. On the other hand, Heaney, belonging to the oppressed Ulster Catholic, projects the communities’ lack - as well as the reaction to overcome this lack - the lost land, language and tradition. Heaney’s point of view and technique are very realistic, while Yeats’s point of view and technique are romantic. Yeats’ landscape is painted purple-coloured ; Heaney’s is described as a dark-coloured one, reflecting his own pity for the oppressed people and their adversity.
After the publication of his book, The Wanderings of Oisin and the Other Poems in 1899 Yeats was keenly interested in the non-English cultures of the British Isles. It was known as the Celtic Twilight. In 1898 he published a volume of essays called “The Celtic Twilight” containing a number of folk stories. In 1891 he founded the Irish Literary Society and worked on a three-volume edition of the poetry of Blake, which was published in 1893. Because of this involvement he pursued the study of symbolism, which is so important for his poetry. The evidence of this is to be found in his two volumes of the decade, The Rose(1893) and The Wind Among the Reeds(1899), with their many uses of the rose and other symbols. Lady Gregory encouraged Yeats’s interest in folk-lores, visiting with him the homes of her tenants and listening to their stories. She also encouraged him to work for the theatre, which led him to the founding of the Irish National Theatre Society in 1902. In this way Yeats attempted to solve the two problems that were central to him as a public poet: the general problem of symbols in literature in an age lacking a common tradition and the particular problems presented by the confusions of the Irish situation. He was impelled to find a way of putting Ireland into some mental order, so that cultural symbols of dependable significance would be at the disposal of the artist. In this context I read the two poems, “To the Rose Upon the Rood of Time” and “The Song of Wandering Aengus” as the manifestations of the Celtic, symbolic tradition of the Irish elite and the tradition of the Irish people respectively. But in the 1890s and the early 1900s, for all his identification with the Gaelic ethos, a wistful hope remained for leadership from a regenerated landlord class. The Ireland that Yeats envisaged was a nation with a distinctive cultural and spiritual identity, and he imagined a community free of sectarian differences and conflicts. That vision was not as revolutionary as some critics have supposed, and it hardly outlasted the 1890s. A century later, however, we find an unusual amount of interest in his early writings.
예이츠의 “Among School Children”을 분석해 보면 이 시가 시적 구조와 예이츠의 “Among School Children” 에 내재한 성서의 세계, 이미저리, 그리고 이 시의 궁극적 메시지가 성서를 그 모델로 하여 지어졌음을 알 수 있다. 이 논문의 목적은 이 시의 삼단계 시적 구조가 기본적으로 성서의 삼단계 구조를 모방했음을 주장하는 것이다. 즉 이 시가 내포하고 있는 각 파트의 주요 이미지 즉 학교 교실, 노령화에 대한 시인의 무기력함, 그리고 댄서의 이미지가 결국 성서에 나오는 이미지 즉 성서 처음의 한 장소에서 다른 장소로 이동하는 모습, 그 이후 끊임없이 되풀이되는 인간의 나약함, 그리고 성서 마지막의 요한 계시록에 나오는 신비의 결혼을 변형한 것이다. 이 시의 주제 중의 하나인 Unity of Being의 실현이 인간의 한계를 해결할 수 있다는 것도 신과 인간의 결혼으로 천국을 이룩할 수 있다는 성서의 종교적 비전을 연상시킨다. “Among School Children”의 내면에는 바이블의 세계가 존재하고 있는 것이다.
As a genre of folk song, the ballad is impersonal in that it often depicts something beyond the personal attitude or emotion of a poet. Yeats, to simplify the diction of his poetry, tried to use the metaphor of ballad, which is a material appropriate to human experience and instinct. As an important device of the ballads, the ‘refrain’ of his poetry is especially marked. The refrain (that is, verbal repetitions) may be a word or a line or groups of words or lines, and appears at the end of each stanza. In addition, Yeats’s use of the refrain is remarkable in his later poetry, particularly in The Winding Stair. The refrain may be without meanings, serving for some musical effect, as in some poems of the Elizabethan Age but it may give life to the language as Friedrich Schiller points out. This essay tries to divide the function of refrain into four types, despite the danger of making Yeats’s poetic range look limited. All the poems are not ruled by only one function but, in part, some poems appear to be with mixed functions. First, the refrain emphasizes poet’s theme through ironic meaning, as in the poems of ‘September 1913,’ and ‘‘The Curse of Cromwell’ and ‘The Three Bushes.’ Secondly, the refrain brings about mystery by the images of silent stillness, as in the poem of ‘Long-legged Fly’ and ‘The Apparitions.’ Thirdly, the refrain may give life to the language in conversion of the meaning, as in the poem of ‘What then?’ Fourthly, the refrain shows nonsense or meaningfulness, as in the poem of ‘The Pilgrim.’ This ‘nonsense’ speaks for his view of life in his later period, and reveals his willing acception of tragic nihilism.
Yeats constantly sought to express in his poetry the images that he actually felt and experienced in the real world. The images in his poetry are the reflection of his dream and ideal, and they are “realities” of the real world transformed through his own imagination. In his early poetry, the images often tend to be illusory and mystical as they depend on materials of legends and myths. But in his middle period, the tendency to be illusory and mystical has gradually vanished, and his poems begin to become realistic, based on materials of common life. But, to me, this change, from the ideal to the real, is not dichotomous. For Yeats, Real and Ideal seemed to be inseparably related to each other under their mutual influence. That is, he sought the realization of Ideal while he didn’t forget Real in his own Ideal because he knew very well that forgetting his Real meant loosing his identity. Furthermore, his poetry shows a dialectical development that becomes a harmony of Real and Ideal by overcoming the conflict between them and by positively accepting the reality of the world. Finally, Yeats created a sublimated reality through internal conflicts of his Real and Ideal. Thus, this essay tries to show the change of reality in Yeats’ poems, which goes through a dialectical development, focusing on the relation between reality and imagination in his poetry.