There are two contradictory voices in W. B. Yeats concerning Irish nationalism. One is for support of Irish nationalism against the English colonial reign and its accompanying heroic sacrifices for the cause of Ireland. The other one is criticism against excessive demands for sacrifices for the sake of independence of Ireland. Instead of putting the first voice ahead of the second one, Yeats tries to record the two voices at the same time: the voice of justification of sacrifices for nationalism and the voice warning danger in nationalism as a commentary on nationalism. These ambivalent attitudes toward nationalism cannot be understood just as his uncertainties and ambivalent stance he took on Irish politics and his lack of understanding of reality. Rather, Yeats could be said as a faithful recorder of the inner territories of experiences of individuals in everyday life and reality under colonial reign and its countermovement of nationalism. He does not ignore the intimate and latent feelings of individuals (on the side of "body") heard through the loud exclamations of nationalistic causes (on the side of "spirit"). Yeats can be said as a postcolonial poet in so far as he supports Irish nationalism but with a hint of anti-nationalistic attitudes, he also raises questions about danger in postcolonial politics. He cannot be called just a crude propagandist of Irish nationalism. Rather by taking balanced attitudes toward nationalism and excessive sacrifices of individuals through nationalistic causes, Yeats suggests that nationalism could be an ideology and gives a warning sign that postcolonial politics should not forget its dark side.

The purpose of this study is to research the relation between Yeats's imagination and the theme of old age, death, and after-life in Yeat's poetry. According to Heraclitus, cosmology is formed aspects of polarity, assuming 'living each other's death, dying each other's life.' The world is conceived as opposition and contradiction, and the human is dual in nature. this dualistic conflict of consciousness has become a basic starting point of his imagination. Yeats recognized the dualistic conflict was an energy of a creative mind and a characteristic of human nature. It brought about the struggle between inner world and outer world. This struggle begins with assuming an individual's anti-self opposed to his primary self. To him, the conflict or struggle, endowed with the meaning of human being existence, is the seed of being of unity. "An Acre of Grass," dealing with the theme of old age, Yeats saw the tragic reality as positive. In spite of decrepitude and quiescence, Yeats said 'Grant me an old man's frenzy, / myself must I remake.' In Yeats's case, great are art is not merely created out of the conjunction of the artist's mind and external world, but rather out of the artist's denial of his primary self and recreation of his mask, the true image of his antithetical self and a fragment of the Anima Mundi. In recreating this fragment he actually creates a higher order of reality than the visible world possesses. Yeats conceive death and life are not divided but connected in "Tower", and "Mohini Chatterjee" as accepting positively human tragic condition. Yeats said that the wheel or cone of the Faculties may be considered to complete its movement between birth and death, that of the Principles to include the period between lives as well in A Vision. In "Byzantium", Yeats deals with the after-life in the view of Four Principles as seeing the soul after death as living reality. To Yeats, the phenomenon of violence, hatred or passion in this world is prerequisite to reincarnation, a creation of other self or true self. After getting rebirth, Yeats tried to reach profane perfection. Looking out over the whole of human life, and its prevailing desolation, he tried to find the proper response to life and suffering in terms of gaiety. Yeats's final response to the old age and death here is no longer the horror, but he accepts the old age and death as the pain of human being with tragic joy through his unique imagination.

Although Yeats declares himself as "the last romantics," it is highly controversial to situate him in the romantic tradition inaugurated by Coleridge's and Wordsworth's theories of the imagination. It is my argument that whereas the romantics often takes the natural landscape as referential and as a means for visionary ends, Yeats makes use of the same landscape to bring divine voices into existence. Among the great romantics I take Coleridge for my argument, since like Yeats he directs his endeavors to the supernatural. In Coleridge's "The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem," the narrator attempts to articulate the experience of nature in an unmediated form, without projection of one's desire onto nature. He attempts to vision of the harmonious correspondence to nature first in "gentle Maid" and then his baby. The question remains open, however, whether a perceived harmony expressed in the poem is also limited and confined by the fragmentary view of the narrator himself. In "Frost at Midnight" the narrator finds himself cut away from the outside world. As an answer to his emptiness he projects onto his son the harmonious state in which the outer world corresponds to the inner world of the child's feelings. The narrator's dependence upon a futuristic vision leaves the question of whether the vision is an expression of an epiphany of the truth perceived or merely a projection of his desire to escape his being disconnected from the outer world onto his son. Vacillation between perception and imagination, which often occupies Coleridge's poetics, suffers much shift in Yeats who with much hesitation turns his attention away from complex dialectic between mind and nature or from choosing one over the other. A part of The Wandering of Oisin shows us well that the image of the shell there is only a mirror for a dream which is no longer that of the shell but the subjective dream of the poet's imagination. To the extent that the shell is a thing in nature, however, the image remains in essence natural, But Yeats already attempts to escape the danger ingrained in the fusion of the perceived object and the perceiving consciousness into one as early as in 1990. In "The Symbolism of Poetry," Yeats makes it clear that his symbol is not simply to evoke its inexhaustible traditional meanings but an intangible reality of the divine essence. Yeats intends to write divine voices into existence and to rediscover the long-unity between man and the gods. Yeats's poetics will be allegorical because the meaning of the symbol is revealed by a key and this key is given as the divine order itself. But it may be realistic in order to make certain that the symbols will be easily recognized and read. This is explicit when Yeats openly tells us that a natural object in a landscape is also to be read symbolically as in "Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931" where Yeats makes the divine symbol fit neatly within the picture of the concrete scene as well as in the network of the symbol. His main purpose for the natural landscape here is to constitute the divine symbols and gain their deeper structural unity and most of their intellectual content by writing divine voice into existence, by recording the signals that reach him from a divine realm.

This paper is an attempt to read “Easter 1916,” one of W. B. Yeats's best-known political poems, in terms of its representation of women and the related politics of sexuality. In the second stanza of the poem where the poet describes four rebels of the Easter Rising, he shows Countess Constance Markievicz. the woman whom Yeats knew so well from his childhood in Sligo. Besides her, the writer of this paper proposes the possibility of reading other two woman images in the poem: Maud Gonne and Cathleen ni Houlihan. By discussing these described or suggested images of women, this paper tries to show that they represent the "terrible beauty" which the poet says the rebels of the Easter Rising have generated.The first woman this paper chooses for discussion is Countess Markievicz. The poet describes her mainly as a woman whose "voice grew shrill" because of her spending "nights in argument," and then compares her present shrill voice with the "sweet" voice she had when she was "young and beautiful." In order to understand the intent of the poet's emphasis on Countess Markievicz's "shrill" voice, the present writer reads one passage from Yeats's journal, where he regards "the shrillness" of voices of "the political class in Ireland" as the result of "the cultivation of hatred as one energy of their movement." In another similar passage, Yeats relates this hatred to "the sexual abstinence, so common among young men and women in Ireland." Based on this reading of Yeats's prose passages, this paper concludes that Countess Markievicz's shrill voice reveals her hatred and her negative attitude to sexual matters. The next part of the paper deals with two women characters, Maud Gonne and Cathleen ni Houlihan. Although she does not appear in the poem, Maud Gonne is suggested in the poem by her similarity to Countess Markievicz and by the poet's mentioning of her husband John MacBride. To support the presence and importance of Maud Gonne in the poem, the writer of this paper briefly reads two poems of Yeats--"A Prayer for My Daughter" and "Among School Children"--where he describes her in a very similar way to the description of Countess Markievicz in "Easter 1916." Another woman, Cathleen ni Houlihan, is also suggested in the poem, because, in terms of symbolic images, she seems to have led the rebels to the battlefield of the rising. This paper reads Yeats's play Cathleen ni Houlihan to show that she also can be understood in this poem in a negative way: she symbolizes the hatred and its resultant sexual abstinence of the rebels. In this way, like Countess Markievicz and Maud Gonne, she can represent the "terrible beauty" of the Easter Rising. Lastly, this paper considers another image of woman which appears in the last and fourth stanza, where the poet ends the poem by naming the rebels "As a mother names her child / Where sleep at last has come / On limbs that had run wild." The writer of the paper thinks that the poet needs this image of mother to mitigate his critique of the rebels which he has done in the third stanza, especially by using the image of stone. By becoming a real mother himself, unlike another "terrible" mother of Ireland, Cathleen ni Houlihan, the poet can arrive at a reconciled and balanced position, and accept the rebels in their contradictory and tragic state.

"Man can embody truth but he cannot know it," said Yeats a few days before his death. And this truth is embodied in the two “death poems,” "Under Ben Bulben" and "The Black Tower". How is that truth embodied? And what is its content? A close reading of the two poems gives some sort of significant answer to that question. The truth Yeats tried to embody may be "Unity of Being", the poet's eternal pursuit. Throughout his long poetic career, wearing various masks, and in various ways, Yeats sought to accomplish its poetic embodiment. To solve multi-levelled divisions of being, Yeats sought persistently to "remake" and "renew" himself, his self as an archetype of the Irish people. "Under Ben Bulben" and "The Black Tower" suggest the poet's dream as returning to and restoring the heroic Celticism and integrating it into making Ireland. In "Under Ben Bulben", drawing on the Celtic heroes' wisdom and strength, the poet asserts his philosophy of reincarnation and man's profane perfection, and, also, the greatness of artists' creative power. After presenting his selected history of the great artists, the poet asks the Irish poets to succeed to his poetic dream. And, then, he casts cold eyes on life, on death, renewing himself as one of the heroes of his dream. In "The Black Tower", the poet's inner drama upon the threshold of death, the tower, his old symbol, reveals itself as a microcosm of Ireland that the poet wishes to defend against his enemies by death. In this poem, the poet does not give up his dream to the final, even if the dark and gloomy mood is dominant. Finally, for the tower's defense, the poet commits "an epic suicide", to become a legendary Irish hero himself. Thus, the poet embodies the truth he has found.

The Two Kings, based on the myths of Edain in the ancient pagan Ireland, is Yeats’s long autobiographical narrative poem. This poem expresses not only the poet’s private love story but also his deep concern in the national affairs with realistic consciousness of responsibility. Therefore, in spite of its mysteriousness it shows that Yeats has traveled far into the actual world since his earlier narrative poems. In this poem Yeats adopted only the main part of the original story and changed its plot and reversed its ending on purpose. He reconstructed the original story and recreated it as a “universal” private mythos through imaginative embellishment and creative modification. Furthermore, by clothing each mythical character with multi-roles and -symbols, he succeeded in making the poem a piece of work with both individuality and universality. Through the symbolical behaviors of the characters, Yeats states his firm conviction that a man’s life should be determined by his own free will, and that the lovers’ happiness should dwell in their earthly life, not in their union after death. And the poet asserts that nothing is more important than the reliance and morality between human beings for our true life and happy love. In addition, the poet contends that a leader of a nation must deliver his subjects from their chronic oppression and poverty.

The first significant modern theatre movement in Korea arose in the early 1920s. As already indicated, since the 1920s, modern Irish drama and its theatre movement had been a major field of interest for the Korean intelligentsia and dramatists, who believed that it provided a model for the modern Korean theatre. The importation of Irish drama was systematically conducted by different groups from the Korean intelligentsia in the 1920s and 1930s, during which period many of them published articles concerning Irish drama and the modern Irish theatre movement. In this paper, the process of importation, adaptation and assimilation of Irish drama into the Korean theatre will be traced. The initial stage of this process revolved around Irish drama which was translated into Korean. Twenty Irish plays were translated during the 1920s and 1930s and some of them were produced on the Korean stage. In this chapter, a complete list of the translated Irish plays will be provided and an analysis of the culturally significant repertories will follow. A further area of discussion will focus on which examples of Irish drama were chosen and how they were altered and interpreted from a Korean perspective. The examples of Irish drama which were translated into Korean reflect the theatrical taste of the Korean intelligentsia. Another important point of this chapter is the quality of translation, which reflects the ability of the leaders of the modern Korean theatre movement both as producers and translators. Many parts of the Irish originals were misinterpreted during the process of translation, either intentionally for political reasons, or unintentionally, due to the lack of linguistic skills. As a result, the mistranslated parts destroyed the original structure of the plays. Even worse, these 'translator's intention- reflected' versions were not only published but also used as the script for performances. This meant that the Korean reader and audience were also subjected to a similar misunderstanding of modern Irish drama. Based on this observation, the other main area of discussion in this chapter is a comparison of the differences between the Irish original plays and the Korean versions and an analysis of the cultural effect which resulted from the intentional changes.

This paper attempts to analyze and prove Yeats' gradual acceptance of the middle class and the people's democracy of South Ireland, just liberated from England. He always struggled against the Irish Catholic bourgeoisie and their practical and political nationalism during his lifetime for realizing his ideal vision of Ireland embodying the “Unity of Being”; he dreamed to establish a culturally aristocratic nation keeping order not by forced law and power but by imagination and desire of self-transcendence, while South Ireland pursued practical interests and became a theocracy. After burning his “rage and lust” against the mass culture of post-colonial Catholic Ireland, Yeats began to admit Catholic Ireland as it was with the perspective of the poetic transcendence, “tragic joy.” His recognition of the Catholic middle class at the end of his life is considered for attaining the sense of unity with Irish people, which was essential to his vision of nation. This paper traces his changing attitudes toward the middle class, especially focusing on such poems as “The Municipal Gallery Revisited,” “The Statues,” “Circus Animal's Desertion,” and “Cuchulain Comforted.”

This is a paper that shows how poetic dialogue plays upon poems between three different authors, William Butler Yeats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. Many of Yeats' poems broach a gentle issue of how they respond to their poetic precursors. "Among School Children" can be read as an updated version of a Romantic "conversation" poem. Coleridge applied the term "conversational poem" to "The Nightingale," one of twenty-tree poems in Lyrical Ballads of 1798. Earlier than this, a phrase Sermoni propriora ("suitable for conversation") appears in his "Reflections, On Having Left a Place of Retirement." These two poems demonstrate Coleridge's conscious efforts at experimenting with conversational speech as a legitimate poetic language. Coleridge's conversational mode is in full bloom in such remarkable poems as "The Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" and "Frost at Midnight," the latter a masterful lyric that paves ways for Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" in its compositional mode and structure. The traffic between the two Romantic authors and "Among School Children" is obvious--a noticeable parallelism is developed in terms of diction, figures, thematic structure, and rhetorical devices. Yeats's "Among School Children" serves as a poetic testimony to the on-going lyrical dialogue that explores possible links between the workings of different poetic minds and that creates remarkable echoing effects.

In connection with the world beyond globalization, new theories such as Samuel Huntington's 'The Clash of Civilization', Gilbert Achcar's 'New World Disorder' and 'The Third World War' are emerging. This paper was motivated by the personal thinking that the Republic of Ireland as Celtic Tiger goes beyond globalization toward 'uisneach', as the hidden tradition, and that Yeats is a great guide to illuminate the quest and that Heaney is an inheritor or an achiever of the quest.This paper begins with the hypothesis that the modern Irish poetry is seeking their hidden tradition, 'uisneach'. I think that to understand the modern Irish poetry, we should first understand what is meant by 'uisneach'. 'Uisneach' has the various meanings: in the geographical sense, it means the area of the "territorially elusive" fifth province of Mide, the navel or the center of Ireland; in the religious sense, it means the sacred center of Ireland in pagan times; in the mythological sense, it is related to the Ulster Cycle including "Oidheadh Chloinne Uisneach", the fate of the Sons of Usnech, known as the Deirdri Ballads; and in the aesthetical sense, it means the origin where creative energy is flowing. W.B. Yeats was a knight in charge of the quest of the Irish political independence through the Celtic Revival against Anglo-Saxon's scientific modernity. His search for 'uisneach' reflects the resistance on the regional as well as the European level against Anglo-saxon's culture. Seamus Heaney's poetry is also going toward the fifth spiritual space where the Irish people believe a reconciliation is to be made, by taking some steps. And lastly, he also goes beyond the global space toward their hidden world based upon Celtic belief and the mild liberalist aestheticism. My last conclusion is that 'uisneach', a hidden tradition or vision means the Celtic vision modern Irish writers have sought. I think that Yeats is a poetic predictor or mentor to illuminate another waste land, Ireland, by suggesting the vision while Heaney is an inheritor in that he goes toward the hidden tradition Yeats suggested.