Per Amica Silentia Lunae (Yeats translated it into Through the Friendly Silences of Moon) was written between January and May of 1917, and consists of a Prologue and an Epilogue for Iseult Gonne, "Ego Dominus Tuss," Anima Hominis and Anima Mundi. In Anima Mundi Yeats said, "I have always sought to bring my mind close to the mind of Indian and Japanese poets, old women in Connacht, mediums in Soho, lay brothers whom I imagine dreaming in some mediaeval monastery the dreams of their village, learned authors who refer all to antiquity: to immerse it in the general mind where that mind is scarce separable from what we have began to call 'the subconscious'... ." In the background of his theory of anti-self there are Indian and Japanese Religious thought, Celtic folklore, Spiritualism, the Order of Golden Dawn, and the great poet Dante. "Ego Dominus Tuss" is a dialogue between two men, Hic and Ille, who discuss poetry and creative process. Ille, like Yeats, is a daimonic poet walking in the moonlight. For Yeats, lunar and subjective were always the antitheses to solar and objective. Poesis called for complete subjectivity, for entry into the friendly silence of the moon. The moon is always associated with feminine divinity. With the help of a mask, Ille is calling to the opposite of his daily self, his anti-self. In the end of the poem, Ille found his anti-self. In Anima Hominis Yeats said that the saint like Christ and Buddha, and the poets like Dante and Keats attained the anti-self. The anti-self is a egoless self, the higher self. Saint, hero, and poet are all inspired. Yeats said, "Saint or hero works in his own flesh and blood and not in paper or parchment, have more deliberate understanding of that other flesh and blood." Only when Yeats became the anti-self could he become a totally subjective mind, overcome the illusion of duality, and find a "revelation of realty." Yeats could receive daimonic inspiration only during visionary experiences. Finally Yeats found the anti-self he felt ecstasy. According to his theory, the production of art was an expression of the artist's longing for "Unity of Being." In Per Amica silentia Lunae Yeats said "the poet, because he may not stand within the sacred house but lives amid the whirlwinds that beset its threshold, may find his pardon."

Yeats received a letter from Sturge Moore complaining about the way he dealt with the goldsmith's bird in his “Sailing to Byzantium”. After Yeats had done a complete version of “Byzantium”, he wrote to Sturge Moore saying, "The poem originates from a criticism of yours." He added that the idea needed exposition. The focus of this paper is to discuss what that idea was which needed exposition. Frank Kermode maintained that Yeats wrote the latter poem to make more absolute the distinction between the goldsmith's bird as the Image and the natural bird. On the other hand, A. E. Dyson argued that Moore's criticism "can be safely ignored." Balancing these two contrary views, we have to rely on what Yeats himself implies as to this topic. What Yeats has to say about Byzantium as a symbolic city can be found in his poem itself and in his book A Vision. In the poem, we find the following expressions, "A Starlet or moonlit dome disdains / All that man is, / All mere complexities / The fury and the mire of human veins." As is evident to all Yeats students, a starlet night is a moonless night, phase 1 (complete objectivity) and a moonlit night is a full moon (complete subjectivity) in his system. These two phases represent superhuman purity. At these two phases human life cannot exist; for all human life entails a mixture of the subjective and the objective, hence "mere complexities." But their importance lies in the fact that they point to two different directions for human beings to pursue perfection. He wrote in his A Vision, "in early Byzantium, maybe never before or since in recorded history, religious, aesthetic and practical life were one." In addition, we have a great dome, symbolic of inclusiveness and the process of purgation in stanzas 4 and 5. We can infer that Yeats tried to represent Byzantium as an ideal city where "religious, aesthetic and practical life" are lived out in harmony with the vision of perfection available to man. But as night becomes day in Byzantium itself, "unpurged images" will surge upon the streets of Byzantium, and so goes on and on the process of purgation.

Aiming to understand the poetry of W. B. Yeats in terms of gender, sexuality, and politics, this paper reads some major poems of his early years. The first part of the paper reads the poems in which the masculine world of war, science, and political power is negated in favor of the feminine world of nature, poetry, and wisdom. The present writer of the paper considers that the femininity of these poems, expressed in the pastoral world of the shepherd, or the stories of Irish legendary King Goll, Fergus, and the fairyland, comes from Yeats's poetic attempt to surmount the British imperial and materialistic world by enhancing the Irish cultural traditions and values. The next part reads a group of poems which deal with Yeats's love of Maud Gonne. Using the image of the rose or the courtly genre, both of them being old traditional poetic conventions, the poet represents Maud Gonne either as a goddess of eternal beauty or a woman of heroic nobility. However, she is also represented as a woman of "lonely face" and "pilgrim soul," a woman who brings "the sorrow of love," or a woman repeatedly associated with the tragic world of Troy. This ambivalence or double vision in the poet's representation of her seems to result form Yeats's ambiguous attitude to Maud Gonne and her revolutionary and social work. The last part of the paper deals with two poems and a play which represent Ireland as a woman. The use of a woman figure as symbolic image of Ireland, especially Yeats's use of Cathleen ni Houlihan in his poetry and drama, is important, because it most distinctively reveals the relations between sexual politics and aesthetic value in the early poetry of Yeats. In this respect, the writer of this paper notes that the woman figure in these works is a highly romanticized and idealized one, rather than a real one with human body and sexual desire, and thinks that this is related to Yeats's version of Iriish nationalism with its strengths and limitations.

“All noble things are the result of warfare; great nations and classes, of warfare in the visible world, great poetry and philosophy, of invisible warfare, the division of mind within itself" said Yeats. Warfares between thesis and antithesis, whether visible or invisible, lie at the heart of Yeats's poetic world, enabling the poet to create the enormously powerful poetic text. In “Meditations in Time of Civil War”, both visible and invisible warfares are overlapped each other, intensifying the division of the poet's own mind, revealing the bitter agony of the poetic self to criticize and remake itself. This poem dramatizes a story of the poet's self-criticism and self-recreation through the warfare between History, the Irish Civil War, and the poet's dream as a cultural nationalist to re-establish and preserve the Irish identity. In “Ancestral Houses”, the poet dreams to redeem the eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish aristocratic ideals for making the unitary Irish mind, only to realize its impossibility. In “My House" through “My Descendants”, the poet seeks to re-establish the Irish identity in his own sanctuary, Thoor Ballylee, through the poetic task to break “the symbolic rose" into flower, only to fail in it, for he has excluded and suppressed History, the Irish Civil War, from his mind. The poet's dream is broken up. In “The Road at My Door" and “The Stare's Nest by My Window", the poet encounters the Civil War face to face, struggling to transform its violence and bitterness into ‘sweetness' and pursuing his dream once more, but it's far from being realized. In “I see Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart's Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness", the poet internalizes the violent and bitter Irish historical realities through his vigorous imagination, severely criticizing himself as a solitary Platonist and remaking his poetic self a more solid one. In “The Tower", written next to this poem, we can meet the enormous power of his recreated poetic self.

Ireland abounds in narrative stories, including mythologies, sagas, legends and folktales, handed down through many generations from the ancient pagan period. In Ireland, especially in the western country Sligo where W. B. Yeats spent the better part of his early days, one cannot go far without hearing the mystic stories of pagan gods, nymphs and ghosts. The Irish are very proud of their unique and traditional Celtic culture and they still believe that the supernatural beings haunt everywhere and intervene in their human affairs. Yeats was educated in England and greatly influenced by many English writers and poets. Yeats, however, born with Celtic spirit and encouraged by the patriot John O’Leary, determined to be a national poet. Therefore, he began to write his early romantic narratives and dramatic verses based on the ancient Irish myths and legends, following the two brilliant predecessors Samuel Ferguson and William Allingham. Besides, what is more important than anything else, he usually put his own life and his unrequited love for Maud Gonne by modifying their themes and symbols into the ancient stories. Thus he succeeded in creating utterly new myths much familiar not only to the Irish today but also to the modern people abroad. Hence he was a renowned myth-maker and -modifier of the age

This paper focuses on the similarities and differences between Robert Browning's dramatic monologue and W. B. Yeats's mask theory. Even though two poets were not contemporaries, it is very interesting that they show some similarities in poetic skills and subjects. Unlike Romantics revealing a poet's subjective feeling directly in their poems, Robert Browning created the dramatic monologue to develop the field of the objective expression. In his “dramatic monologue,” a character instead of the poet utters the speech that makes up the whole of the poem, in a specific situation at a critical moment. This person addresses and interacts with other people and we know of his presence, as well as what they say and do, only from the clues in the discourse of the single speaker. In his “My Last Duchess” the Duke is negotiating with an emissary for a second marriage, and the reader can know the speaker's cruel character and intentions. In his “Andrea Del Sarto,” though Andrea was one of the greatest painters in the Renaissance period, he was a failure as an artist because of his artistic passion and indomitable spirit. Excusing his artistic frustration, he once more tries to believe his wife's lies. When Yeats entered art school in Dublin in 1884, he was an enthusiastic reader of English poetry, especially Browning. Yeats was an admiring reader of Browning's poetry, and Browning was one of the nineteenth-century forefather poets of Yeats. He explored, as Browning did, the themes of creative men divided within themselves and struggling to unify their inspirations toward love and intellect, aesthetic contemplation and heroic action. In this process, Yeats developed the concept of masks from the other self in contrast to the natural self perceiving a man as the conflicting existence between subjectivity and objectivity. In his doctrine of mask, Yeats provided a formal aesthetic for the poet's need to speak dramatically through the masks of other personalities; Browning had long practised dramatic poetry in principle in which he donned the masks of personalities totally unlike his own. Browning tended to hide his interests behind the masks of his characters, whereas Yeats more openly voiced a variety of mystical and antithetical thoughts. Yeats happened to find an occasional, almost incidental similarity of language and a shared attitude toward the sources of poetic inspiration with Browning's. By 1929, when he was sixty-four years old, rewriting and revising his poetry with an eye to a collected edition, he announced that he would be turned from Browning. Yeats was an appreciative reader of the older poet, but the great achievement of Yeats's poetry transformed and transcended the influence of Browning.

William Butler Yeats was born at Georgeville, Sandymount Avenue, Dublin, in 1865, and died in the South of France, in January 28, 1939. Yeats was fifty in 1915-1916. He provides a poetic rendering of his visionary experience at his fiftieth year in the fourth section of "Vacillation" written in November 1931, when he became absorbed in the philosophical thinking while writing A Vision: "My fiftieth year had come and gone,/ I sat, a solitary man,/ In a crowded London shop,/ An open book and empty cup/ On the marble table-top./ While on the shop and street I gazed/ My body of a sudden blazed;/ And twenty minutes more or less/ It seemed, so great my happiness,/ That I was blessed and could bless."(CPN 251). In May 9, 1917, recalling his fiftieth year, Yeats describes this experience in a prose, entitled "Anima Mundi": "Perhaps I am sitting in some crowded restaurant, the open book beside me, or closed, my excitement having overbrimmed the page. I look at the strangers near as if I had known them all my life, and it seems strange that I cannot speak to them: everything fills me with affection, I have no longer any fears of any needs; I do not even remember that this happy mood must come to an end. It seems as if the vehicle had suddenly grown pure and far extended and so luminous that the images from Anima Mundi, embodied there and drunk with that sweetness, would, like a country drunkard who has thrown a wisp into his own thatch, burn up time." (Myth 364-5) Seamus Heaney was born in April 13, 1939 in Count Derry, Northern Ireland, and has been attacking Yeats since 1980s for the latter's aristocratic mysticism and spiritual matters. Heaney gave a lecture at Oxford University in 1990, entitled "Joy or Night: Last Things in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats and Philip Larkin." This lecture was given at the end of his own fiftieth year and simultaneously commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of Yeats's death. In this lecture, Heaney comes to open up "a sudden comprehension" to Yeats's vacillating visionary experience of the spirit in "The Cold Heaven": "The spirit's vulnerability, the mind's awe at the infinite spaces and its bewilderment at the implacable inquisition which they representall of this is simultaneously present" (The Redress of Poetry 148). In "Fostering," a poem from Seeing Things (1991), Heaney professes his poetic admission of Yeatsian visionary position: "Me waiting until I was nearly fifty/ To credit marvels" (50). In short, Heaney reaches what Yeats did for the spiritual world. The main objective of this paper is to demonstrate how Heaney reacts Yeats's poetry of vision. My focus is on the year fifty, when they erupt their creative energy in terms of "vacillation"which nevertheless shows the provocative and violent dynamism of the Yeatsian "interlocking gyres."

William Butler Yeats was born at Georgeville, Sandymount Avenue, Dublin, in 1865, and died in the South of France, in January 28, 1939. Yeats was fifty in 1915-1916. He provides a poetic rendering of his visionary experience at his fiftieth year in the fourth section of "Vacillation" written in November 1931, when he became absorbed in the philosophical thinking while writing A Vision: "My fiftieth year had come and gone,/ I sat, a solitary man,/ In a crowded London shop,/ An open book and empty cup/ On the marble table-top./ While on the shop and street I gazed/ My body of a sudden blazed;/ And twenty minutes more or less/ It seemed, so great my happiness,/ That I was blessed and could bless."(CPN 251). In May 9, 1917, recalling his fiftieth year, Yeats describes this experience in a prose, entitled "Anima Mundi": "Perhaps I am sitting in some crowded restaurant, the open book beside me, or closed, my excitement having overbrimmed the page. I look at the strangers near as if I had known them all my life, and it seems strange that I cannot speak to them: everything fills me with affection, I have no longer any fears of any needs; I do not even remember that this happy mood must come to an end. It seems as if the vehicle had suddenly grown pure and far extended and so luminous that the images from Anima Mundi, embodied there and drunk with that sweetness, would, like a country drunkard who has thrown a wisp into his own thatch, burn up time." (Myth 364-5) Seamus Heaney was born in April 13, 1939 in Count Derry, Northern Ireland, and has been attacking Yeats since 1980s for the latter's aristocratic mysticism and spiritual matters. Heaney gave a lecture at Oxford University in 1990, entitled "Joy or Night: Last Things in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats and Philip Larkin." This lecture was given at the end of his own fiftieth year and simultaneously commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of Yeats's death. In this lecture, Heaney comes to open up "a sudden comprehension" to Yeats's vacillating visionary experience of the spirit in "The Cold Heaven": "The spirit's vulnerability, the mind's awe at the infinite spaces and its bewilderment at the implacable inquisition which they representall of this is simultaneously present" (The Redress of Poetry 148). In "Fostering," a poem from Seeing Things (1991), Heaney professes his poetic admission of Yeatsian visionary position: "Me waiting until I was nearly fifty/ To credit marvels" (50). In short, Heaney reaches what Yeats did for the spiritual world. The main objective of this paper is to demonstrate how Heaney reacts Yeats's poetry of vision. My focus is on the year fifty, when they erupt their creative energy in terms of "vacillation"which nevertheless shows the provocative and violent dynamism of the Yeatsian "interlocking gyres."

Yeats and Pound were the two central poets of the 20th century, dominating the modernist poetry in the first half and second half of the century. Pound began as Yeats's "student" reading the older poet's The Wind among the Reeds. When the apprenticeship with Yeats at Stone Cottage was over, Pound served as patron to almost all the major poets and writers, and some painters. Unlike the mythology of the last 50 years, in matters of poetic influence between them, Pound seems to have got more than he gave to Yeats. For instance, Pound could not find the value of the new poetic form emerging in Yeats's "Adam's Curse" which is alongside "Red Hanrahan's Song about Ireland." It is because he admired the early Yeats so much. It is not until Pound was bored by the shadows and dreams in his own poetry that he began to see "Adam's Curse," "No Second Troy," "Reconciliation." Before Pound did anything, Yeats had already undegone some transformation in his poetry. Then, why Pound had been so immersed in the early Yeats? Yeats had been a complex personality, capable of making use of what had seemed impossible as material for poetry: magic and mysticism, arts, folkore, Romantic poetics in his earlier career and politics, Noh drama, philosophy. At the last moment Yeats and Pound emerge as different poets; the older poet neither commits himself to his world nor alienates himself from it: he contemplates it as detached artist. Pound, on the other hand, chooses to be in utter solitude, with his memories of Stone Cottage sustaining him.

However hard a poet may cry out 'art for art's sake', art works are likely to be evaluated by the political surroundings: a poet is very likely to represent the class he belongs to and to react to the political situation through his own works. A poet who suffers from the turmoil of the transitional period can be a victim of the period in the sense that he can be evaluated irrespective of the real value of his works. This paper is motivated by our current social phenomena that the fanatical nationalism to evacuate the past is also applied to the work of reevaluating writers of the past as well as of the present; interestingly, the same situation happened to Yeats. This paper starts with some hypothesis that the primary reason for the lower reevaluation of Yeats since the birth of Free State until its rebirth as a member of E.U. is that he belonged to the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy. And then this paper investigates identity and contribution of the Anglo-Irish to Irish history. And finally this paper tries to find out how Yeats reacted to the radical change of hegemony especially after Responsibilities. The investigation into his poems leads us to the conviction that in his first stage, he wanted to surrender his half-blooded Englishness to his another half-blooded Irishness. This explains why he tried to dig up the ancient Gaelic culture and to advocate the Gaelic Catholic in his first stage. However we can witness his changing attitude after the Easter Rising: some threat from the majority Catholic fanaticism awakened Yeats's self-recognition as an Anglo-Irish, advocating their class and culture in his poems since Responsibilities. It follows that although Yeats wanted to be an artist for art as such, he could not but seek for reconciliation of two aspects of Ireland, -that is, its religion and ethnicity. Yeats's poetry reflects the shift in the political hegemony and the definition of the Irish identity. My conclusion is as follows. The main reason Yeats's evaluation was going down during the period Ireland was being established as a republic country is that he belonged to the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, the past power group. Through Yeats's poems we can witness the decline and agony of the Anglo-Irish during the birth of Republic of Ireland. Therefore the historical contribution of the Anglo-Irish is to be reevaluated; Yeats's Literary Revival is also referred to as "a cracked mirror of the servant". By reading again Yeats's poems from the new perspective towards Yeats as an Anglo-Irish, we can see that Yeats's advocacy of the Anglo-Irish was made only after he was threatened by the fanatical Catholic nationalism and that he adhered to the reconciliation of the divided Ireland throughout his life. Meanwhile, this study leads to another question: Is it possible that the art is free from the political pressure or turmoil? In my opinion, although art is not free from that situation, it can only survive when it shines in the filthy tide, searching for the independence and freedom. I think W.B. Yeats is an example.