Based on the assumption that Maud Gonne was one of the most important persons in Yeats’s life and art, this paper is an attempt to understand the “labyrinthine” nature of their complex relationship. However, the present writer is not trying to dig into their lives for the specific facts which might be used to support his argument; rather, he is trying to read some of Yeats’s poems in such a way to illuminate his relation to Gonne. That is, through the close reading of related poems, the present writer examines how Gonne is thematically and formally represented in Yeats’s poems, how the representations change through the years of his life, and how they are related to other aspects of his poetry. The first introductory part of this paper very briefly surveys the life of Gonne, how her relationship with Yeats began and continued, and how she influenced him in writing his poems. Although it is true that she brought into his life “an overpowering tumult,” it is also true that between fifty and sixty of Yeats’s poems were created in the wake of their relationship. The main part of the paper analyzes Yeats’s poems chosen from his early, middle and late period of life. Some poems, such as “The Sorrow of Love,” “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven,” “Adam’s Curse,” “No Second Troy,” “The Cold Heaven,” “A Prayer for my Daughter,” “Among School Children” are more closely and thoroughly read than others. In reading the poems, this paper tries to show how the poet’s representations of Gonne in the poems reveal not only the actual situations of their relationship at the moment of their writing but also the aesthetic and political ideologies of the poet himself at that moment.

In the history of literature, women have appeared more as subsidiary figures to inspire or help male authors than as creators of literature themselves. Dante’s Beatrice, Petrarch’s Laura, and Dorothy Wordsworth can be cited as classical examples. Maud Gonne, Yeats’s lifelong lover, does not go beyond the boundary. In his poetry, Yeats portrayed her as an embodiment of eternal beauty, femme fatale like Helen of Troy or Deidre of Ireland, heroic figure of unbounded nobility and courage. But Yeats did not always praise and idealize her. He showed his dissatisfaction with her violent political activities and in his poetry she appeared as a heedless, overly proud woman who had wrought her own misfortune. But however diversified and numerous her images may have been, she exists in his poetry as objectified images shaped by Yeats’s transformed imagination. But in 1997, Maud’s letters to Yeats during the entire period of their acquaintance were published. Through them, we can get access to her as ‘a speaking subject’ uttering her own thoughts and emotions. We can acquire firsthand information on their relationship and direct response to the various incidents. By analyzing her letters in detail, I tried to present hitherto unknown aspects of Maud Gonne and shed light on some misunderstandings about her. For example, some critics denounced her indifference to Yeats’ poetry. But in her letters, she continually advised him not to let other activity ― be it political or theatrical―deprive him of his time and energy to engage in his proper work-writing of poetry. And her sincere concerns for the poor, the suffering, and the underpriviledged and her sympathetic understanding of women’s situation in Ireland have been hitherto unappreciated. As this essay’s main concern is Maud Gonne as a speaking subject of the letters, its aim is not an authoritative biographical study on Maud Gonne, but to view her life from a new perspective.

This paper aims to examine Yeats‘ influence on Larkin. As Larkin has said that he spent three years trying to write like Yeats in the Introduction to the 1966 issue of The North Ship(1945), the impact of Yeats was the result of an inspiring visit by the poet Vernon Watkins to the Oxford University Club in 1943. Larkin was deeply impressed by Watkins, and became an ardent admirer of Yeats. Many of the poems in The North Ship were modelled after the work of Yeats. Yeatsian rhythms and a Yeatsian choice of phrase are encountered through The North Ship. As well as technical borrowings, he adopts Yeatsian attitudes and begins to write impassioned lyric rather than a specific devotion of Yeats. The most immediate effect of Yeats on Larkin’s poetry is the romanticism which appears prominently in this volume. After publishing The North Ship, Larkin subsequently rejected Yeats’s influence and turned for inspiration to the poetry of Thomas Hardy, whom he still regards as his model. The poems in The Less Deceived and The Whitsun Weddings display Hardy’s influence. The most important difference is that Larkin swept away the romantic and melancholy tone of Yeats’s early Celtic period. On the other hand, Larkin had abandoned the metaphysical euphoria of Yeats at the beginning of his poetic career. Yeats accepts every part of existence, by looking inwards to form a unity of being by a faith in self, whereas Larkin shows us that the acceptance of fact and life does not always provide an answer to our hopes. In this respect, Larkin’s art is in sharp contrast with Yeats from the beginning. In “Sailing to Byzantium,” Yeats traveled to Byzantium, a holy city of intellect, to search for spiritual life, but Larkin went on the darkening sea, the cold North. In Yeats’s poetry, man lives many lives before death, and death creates a new hero as Hanraham in “The Tower,” but death in Larkin’s poetry prompts emotion rather than metaphysical or theological assertion, and remains one of the great traditional subjects for the exercise of serious or comic wit. He eliminates illusion from death and accepts it as a real thing in life and does not create it as a hero after death. Through this contrast, both Yeats and Larkin generate archetypes of reality. However, Larkin is not a transcendental writer, he is not a Yeats nor is he a Hardy; his main themes are men, the life of men, the passing of time, and a belief that man is always in thrall to time.

In this thesis I discussed feministic attitudes in the works of three writers: William Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion, William Butler Yeats’ A Woman Young and Old, and Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching(道德經). Blake and Yeats were English visionary poets and Lao Tzu was an Old Master who lived in the 2nd century B.C. in Han Dynasty China. In Visions of the Daughters of Albion Blake is not only concerned with the rights of women but also with the slavery systems and freedom. The heroine is called ‘soft soul of America.’ Blake knew the first radical feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and may be responding to her enthusiasm for the emancipation of women. Moreover, the oppression of Oothoon is bound up with the campaign of the early 1790s against both the slave trade and the nearer cruelties in the exploitation of child labour. The heroine Oothoon is raped by Bromion and abandoned by her lover, Theotormon. Theotormon’s jealousy binds them, back to back in a cave. Bromion’s violence and Theotomon’s jealousy and oppression cause her woe. She is trying to justify the innocence of love, the joy in the making of love and delight in life, the beautiful in every life. Her long outburst against hypocrisy in marriage and restraint in love in the third section of the poem is for women repressed by men in traditional and Christian society. She wants to be a human, not a servant of man. In A Woman Young and Old the woman speaks first in youth, then in age. This series of poems are companion poems to those of A Man Young and Old. These poetic sequences have an identical structure of eleven poems, ending with a section from Yeats’ translation of the Oedipus cycle. The first poem, “Father and Child” opens with an image of a young woman leaving the conventional world and the judgment of other people for an attractive life and her own opinions. In the sixth poem in the central position, “Chosen” the woman takes for her theme the theme of the poem. The young woman compares the peace and feeling of completeness after lovemaking to the perfect moment when the “Zodiac is changed into a sphere,” the Thirteenth Cycle or Thirteenth Cone in A Vision. It is that cycle which may deliver us from the twelve cycles of time and space. In the last poem, “From the ‘Antigone’” the old woman, now a tragic heroine, narrates her descent “into the loveless dust.” The heroine in A Woman Young and Old tries to find her own voice and life. In the first chapter of Tao Te Ching the nameless Tao is the origin of heaven and earth which grows the myriad things. Thus these two are the same. Upon appearing, they are named differently. Their sameness is the mystery, mystery within mystery. Heaven is the symbol of man; earth is the symbol of woman. Man and woman have the same root, and their union makes the myriad things. In the sixth chapter of the book Lao Tzu praises feminity, called ‘the valley spirit,’ the root of heaven and earth. The valley is used metaphorically as a symbol of ‘emptiness’ or ‘vacancy;’ ‘the spirit of the valley’ is something invisible, yet almost personal, belonging to the Tao. ‘The female mystery’ is the name of chapter 1, or the Tao which is ‘the Mother of all things.’ All living beings have a father and a mother. Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching could be translated as The Law (or Canon) of Virtue and its Way. He thought that all straining, all striving is not only vain but counterproductive. One should endeavor to do nothing (wu-wei). It means not to do anything literally, but to discern and follow the natural forces-to flow with events and not to pit oneself against the natural order of things. In this way Taoist philosophy reached out to council rulers and advised them how to govern their domains. Blake and Yeats insist women’s human rights and the union of man and woman can give us the perfect moment in this life. Lao Tzu teaches us feministic Tao and the harmony of man and woman. The three share great wisdom about the order of the nature and can elucidate the way of Feminism.

W. B. Yeats and Thomas Hardy, as poets, were contemporaries. Their long careers spanned the transition from Romanticism to Modernism and their poetry constitute two of the most powerful dealings with that transition and those traditions. Younger poets after Yeats and Hardy have attested to their significant influences on their works respectively. Until 1930s it seems that the poets preferred Hardy as their poetic model, but after the 30s such a stand has become unpersuasive. Considering the course and interdependence of these two poets’ reputations and influences, we are led to acknowledge that Yeats and Hardy defined the options for poets for the whole period of the 20th century and that consequently poets have tended to be divided into two distinguishable streams. This paper aims to distinguish those different streams through the poetic works of Yeats and Hardy. There is some hint of determinism in both Yeats and Hardy, but with very important difference. In Yeats’s early poetry human weakness is implied despite a heavy-handed insistence on nature’s sympathetic; identification with man. But Hardy’s poetry implies a human strength in the face of a nature indifferent to man’s social arrangements and adjustments. Yeats proceeds dramatically to make a system, a private mythology; Hardy shows the structure of a mind capable of coming to a disturbing conclusion. Both Yeats and Hardy find nature for the most part unsympathetic to man, but while Yeats prefers to escape to a dreamy or fairy land or The Great Mind, Hardy illustrates man’s own resistance and adjustment within this world of reality. So, while Yeats offers a vision of a higher reality beyond or behind nature, Hardy, as a result of his acute scrutiny of appearances of the real world, offers us personal and narrative instances of man’s responses to the neutrality of nature. Hardy’s dealings with reality are for the most part moral, while those of Yeats’s incline to amorality, which means that Yeats allows himself to wander far from an acknowledgment of the limits of our individual lives and strengths. These different attitudes to reality lead to their poetic tone: Hardy’s-control of tone, Yeats’s being high and energetic. Considering the comparative characteristics of Yeats and Hardy we are led to conclude that they defined the options for the younger poets following after then: experimental and traditional, modernist and anti-modernist visionary, and discursive and rhetorical and plain.

이 논문의 전제는 Yeats와 Walcott 둘 다 “화가”라는 데에, 그래서 그들의 예술관이 시에 대한 견해로 풀이될 수 있는 작가들이라 점이다. Yeats와 Walcott는 예술의 두 큰 줄기로 구분되어 질 수 있다. 즉, 고전주의와 인상주의가 그것이다. 본 논문이 논의한 각 개념들과 이론들의 출발점은 이 두 가지 이다. Loizeaux은 Yeats를 가장 광범위하고 깊이 있게 시각예술의 관점에서 다루고 있는데, 그녀의 결론은 Yeats의 시가 조각적이라는 것이다. 이 결론은 날카로운 관찰인데도, 그녀는 Yeats가 본질적으로 Classicism의 form을 지니고 있다고 까지는 지적하지 못하는 것 같다. 본 논문은 지나친 단순화의 위험에도 불구하고, Yeats를 그러한 기질의 시인이라는 결론을 내린다. 그러나, 그가 고전주의 시인이라는 말과 는 전혀 다르다는 것도 지적해 둔다. 반면에, Walcott은 초기의 자기 주변의 영향과 자신의 성향에도 불구하고, 기질과 태생적으로 인상주의적 경향을 보이는 시인이다. 그의 시적 기법은 인상주의 화가 Cezanne에 근접한다고 보아도 좋은 것 같다. 그러나, 두 시인 모두 “artistic expression”으로서의 technique는 완벽하게 다듬은 것으로 받아 드려진다. 두 시인의 최고의 시들은 형식에는 판이한 차이를 보이나,“하늘에서 불을 가져오는”데에는 성공한다. 둘 다 우리에게 위대한 시적 유산을 남긴 시인들이다.

I have just read two of the greatest writers of the 20th century, W. B. Yeats and Jose Saramago. As there is almost no source of Saramago for reference or for study, the only and best way to study them was to read him closely. As a matter of fact, it seems to me the best to measure up the depth and width of Saramago as novelist by going deep into his novel, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. The workmanship of Saramago, as in the case of Yeats, is extremely delicate and precise. Every image, every syllable of every word, each counts while in the process of the story as well as toward the end of the story. Saramago casts away the quotation marks when he has a dialog; as a result, when reading a dialog, you can’t tell who is who. But no problem arises, for once you read it, you enjoy being forced to go along the dialog, understanding and appreciating every syllable of the words in the sentences, as if you are part of the dialog. This is one secret attraction to Saramago. That is, he is a great, inventive stylist. Another characteristic is that Saramago makes no distinction between the visible and the invisible world. Just as Yeats did, before him, Saramago treats the invisible as if it is alive and lives with you. Compared with Saramago, Yeats is read through one of his best stories, “The Crucifixion of the Outcast.” Yet, as Yeats had been studied for quite a long time, both in English-speaking world and in other countries, like Korea, I could have more than enough materials with me. So, I decided to use his Letters exclusively. As in other stories of The Secret Rose, Yeats’s use of punctuation is traditional, as in his poetry; yet, if you look closer, you will see Yeats is different from other traditional writers. He has gone much farther than his contemporaries. Yeats as novelist should be reevaluated. His workmanship as short storyteller compares well with his French counterparts. Yeats could be a great novelist, if he had worked on it further, as Robert Bridges had once advised him to do. But as he is, Yeats as novelist should be thought of highly, as the finest novelists of the 20th century, like Saramago (who might have been influenced by Yeats’s stories) must been inspired by the fire Yeats has just bought from heaven.

Yeats remarked, two years before his death, that it is the poets’ first business to describe desirable persons, desirable places, and states of mind. One of theses excellent persons and places in Last Poems―ascetics and the “half-way house” the Chinamen of “Lapis Lazuli” climb towards. Here we notice how many topographical associations lay everywhere: “the mountain,” “Alt” and the central character climbing some high point. Having lifted himself to the vantage point of age, Yeats is able to form a final altitude. The last poems are mainly set in the location of the open field, that dominates the poetic landscape. ‘The whole system’ of A Vision ‘is founded upon the belief that ultimate realit y…falls in human consciousness into a series of antinomies.’ Since he had long arranged his thought and disciplined his imagination by ideas of antithesis, it is natural that his later work should play out an extended series of oppositions: knowledge and ignorance; day and night; time and eternity. In the process of consciousness they have a tendency to be separated from each other into various sets of the opposite; while their attendant logic characterizes a struggle towards harmony. ‘Logical and emotional conflicts alike lead towards a reality which is concrete, sensuous and bodily.’ “Meru” invokes an image of human being in conflict with the cyclicity of a cosmic rhythm. Yeats, identified with the oriental hermits in the ascetic attitude to life, sees “the naked bodies” to awake to the realities of life, he is reassured that the higher perception should be gained through their sensuous experiences in the darkness of night. According to St. John of Cross, ‘the nature of the soul requires complete renunciation of the world.’ The darkness brings wisdom, emptiness sight. Yeats would describe it as ‘the luminous dark.’ This implies in ‘via negativa’ that one is nothing, paradoxically, to become everything. The open region for everything is the place Heidegger called ‘clairiēre,’ which Yeats would like to paint in his poetry. Its openness let brightness play with darkness in it. The relation to light and darkness characterizes as ‘a double’ like the dawn image. This curious relation Adams claims to name ‘identity.’ Identity has the same form, as does a metaphorical trope, where sameness and difference coexist in language. He would write a poem ‘cold and passionate as the dawn.’ The important metaphor, which Yeats uses to describe the intersection of the two worlds, is that of dawn. In this paper I was concerned with both the realm where religion, art, personal consciousness converge and the place in which gathers and protects everything. Yeats was life long a man who practiced both absolute integrity of craft and perfection of personality, the perfection of its surrender. I take poetry to be an exploration of human consciousness, where it faces time and eternity in their play. Equally it is an exploration of words.

In this paper, through appreciating one of W. B. Yeats’s later poems, I try to find how the poet’s creative self gets to have its creative power and in what mechanism it expands its poetic circumference. “Among School Children” is the very poem his poetic self and creative imagination are well wrought into. In the poem, the poet suggests that power and knowledge cannot exist together, speaking of the powerful theories of Plato and simultaneously of the philosopher’s powerless being before Nature. He praises Aristotle as a king of kings, and Pythagoras as world-famous golden-thighed, but he mocks them of being old clothes upon an old stick to scare a bird. In the same way, he asserts that “the body is not bruised to pleasure soul.” In the sense of deconstructionists, all the binary oppositions have their hierarchies; however, Yeats puts the two antithetical elements on the identical level, as they are not subordinated to each other, and tries to bridge the abyss or space between. Such an attempt to unite the opposite worlds is manifested in his A Vision. Concerning his “gyre” theory, the figure is frequently drawn as a double cone. The one is called primary gyre, representing space, intellect, mask and fortune; the other antithetical one to represent time, emotion, creativity and will. The narrow end of each cone is in the centre of the broad end of the other. Seen at the narrow end of each cone through the centre of each broad end, appears a circle having a dot at the center. This is the poet’s world of imagination whose centre is his “self” and whose circumference is the limit of the self’s perception. The poet’s life-long activities are related with his efforts to expand the circumference. “Among School Children” is a trace of such activities. The centre is the place where the self of the poet is located; the circumference is where the self “perceives its limitation,” or where arises the feeling of awe, terror, or ecstasy, which means a kind of tension geared between the binary opposite worlds: the finite and the infinite; the mortal and the immortal; life and death; the real and the ideal; youth and age; the body and soul; pleasure and despair. The perception network of the poet connects the centre and circumference. The power to widen the circle originates from the poet’s paradoxical sense of life, of deprivation, and of renunciation through an attainable love with Maud Gonne, tensions between religious struggles, civil revolutions, and so on. The sharp confrontation of these tensions takes place rise to in the circumference and stimulates the poet’s creative imagination. This power of self strengthened by these tensions starts its quest-journey to explore the mysteries beyond the limit of its circle: the mysteries of the opposite worlds separated here and there. The ultimate purpose of the journey, finally, is to reach the united condition of the two worlds, which means what Greg Johnson calls “the highest imaginative enhancement of human identity” or immortality. This united world is the place where “we cannot know the dancer from the dance” and where Yeats’s “unity of being” is synthesized.