This paper is an attempt to discuss Yeats’s ultimate reality. Yeats’s Unity of Being can be said to be similar to the system of Upanishad’s AUM because AUM is the combination of Brahman and Atman. Upanishad’s ascetic realized that Atman, reaching to a state of Turiya, can be Brahman. Subject and object, Atman and Brahman, dancer and dance, and the Four Principles and the Four Faculties also become one in Turiya. As we would identify Atman with our self, Brahman is our self-consciousness. Moreover, if we would identify Atman with our body, Brahman become a cosmos that reveals itself. Yeats understood the Self, the ultimate reality, through Upanishad. His macrocosm was made up of Husk, Passionate Body, Spirit, and Celestial Body and his microcosm was made of Will, Mask, Creative mind, and Body of Fate. In A Vision, the Four Principles, which consists of Husk, Passionate Body, Spirit, and Celestial Body affected individually and complementarily the Four Faculties which consists of Will, Mask, Creative mind, and Body of Fate. Spirit and Celestial Body are mind and its object, while Husk and Passionate Body are sense and the object of sense. Will and Mask are will and its object, while Creative Mind and Body of Fate are thought and its object. The whole system is based upon the belief that the Self falls in human consciousness. Robartes, from self-contained energy of contemplation, encompassed cyclic system in “The Double Vision of Michael Robartes”. He strayed away from the physical world, found his way into the supernatural world, and returned to the physical world again. Robartes's first vision is the state of total objectivity in which no human life exists. It is identical with U of Upanishad and Mask of the Four Faculties. And his second vision is, then, the state of total subjectivity, Sushupti, which unifies subject and thought, object and idea. It is the same as M of Upanishad and Creative Mind of the Four Faculties. However, he momentarily reaches eternity, Turiya, through the multiple contemplation. It is AUM of Upanishad and Body of Fate of the Four Faculties. In Turiya, Brahman and Atman, Buddha and Sphinx, dancer and Helen are integrated into one and accomplish the ultimate reality as a phaseless sphere. In conclusion, Yeats showed Unity of Being in “The Double Vision of Michael Robartes”. His Unity of Being is a kind of Turiya of Upanishad. He attains the Ultimate Reality completely, in which subject and object, macrocosm and microcosm, Brahman and Atman, the Four Principles and the Four Faculties are unified in the space without the time. He achieves the ultimate reality as an eternal instant. This ultimate reality is Yeats’s Unity of Being.

Natural Image in Yeats`s early poetry shows the relationship and tension between nature and consciousness. In Romantic poetry, natural image comes to be the most prominent dimension of the style. Natural image mediates between natural object and human consciousness and becomes an critical indicator of the problematic crisis related with the status of poetic language. Assuming the pantheistic nostalgia toward nature and the ontological primacy of the natural object, poetic consciousness compares poetic language to the natural object and desires to give poetic language the stability and substantiality of the natural object. However, poetic language which originates from nothingness differs from the natural object which is an epiphany, a natural emanation of a transcendental principle. Due to the ontological difference between them, poetic language fails to get the status of the natural object. The attempt to overcome the failure of the mimetic natural image leads to the self-conscious natural image. This conscious natural image belongs to the tradition of symbolism. Within the image nature and consciousness are mutually transformed and united. Now nature becomes the starting point and the mirror which reflects acts of consciousness. The self-reflective image is a reflection of consciousness which is reflected on the nature-as-mirror. It needs the natural object as its starting point and has no material substance; therefore, it fails to possess itself as its object and faces the narcissistic predicament in which consciousness is alienated from nature. Due to the intrinsic discrepancy of the natural image, the hope to unite nature and consciousness is frustrated. Consciousness still belongs to nature and poetic language becomes to face the crisis of sterility and extinction. This study considers the dialectic between nature and consciousness through the natural image of Yeats`s early poetry.

This article examines Yeats’s laughter which operates as an overtone, undercurrent, or a keynote throughout all his work. We discover that his comic aspects betray various meanings or nuances. First, the comic elements in Yeats are explosive in that they function as a means of disorienting and transgressing social regulations, and social categories like class, gender, race within a social system. Moreover, laughing escapes from and discards the established system at a burst as the disproportionate laughter of King Goll in “The Madness of King Goll.” Furthermore, Tom’s laugh in “Tom O’Roughley” concentrates itself on the aimless joy as Derrida says that laughing laughs at itself like a sovereign operation. Secondly, the laughing in Yeats is conveyed in the degradation of the dignified or exalted objects. Freud says that the increased expenditure of the solemn restraint discharges vacantly when it does not satisfy its higher purpose. Sometimes the lightest thing can acquire superiority over the weightiest by pulling down or aerification which makes the solemnity unable to retain its dignity. In “Crazy Jane Reproved,” Jane challenges the omnipotent God with such lighthearted refrain as fol de rol. The technique of pulling down applies to the depreciation of national monument or eternal art. Yeats knows well that Maud Gonne will be slighted by the coming generations and that the great Irish patriots, O’Donell, Emmet, and Parnell can also be mocked severely. Likewise the eternal art as the marble of Callimachus cannot avoid damages from weightless wind. Yet, for Yeats laughing is not always easy to express; he cannot release any laughter encountering with the same situation as effortless laughing was possible once. In “The Apparitions,” Yeats confesses that he required all his energies to disperse the fright of an apparition which he could easily have laughed at last time. On the other hand, there is an occasion in which the childish and vulgar comic changes to utter solemnity like a revolution. Yeats examines the transformation of the middle class carefully from indulging in silly talks to generating terrible beauty in “Easter 1916.” The trivial levity turns into the sublime inconceivably without intention. Lastly Yeats proposes a peculiar and paradoxical laughter which is difficult to vocalize as in “A Dialogue of Self and Soul.” This sort of laugh cannot surpass the burden of secular life, but great sweetness like Nietzsche’s tragic joy can break out even if the afflictions of human life make it distorted.

This study examines Celtic fairy tales relating to the sociocultural background of Ireland in Victorian Age. W. B. Yeats's Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, 1888 and Irish Fairy Tales, 1892, The Celtic Twilight, 1893, and Joseph Jacobs's Celtic Fairy Tales, 1892 and More Celtic Fairy Tales, 1894 are correlated with the Irish celtic history, religion and culture. They are best known as collectors of fairy tales at that time. Jacobs thought that the fate of the Celt in the British Empire bids fair to resemble that of the Greeks among the Romans, "they went forth to battle, but they always fell, yet the captive Celt has enslaved his captor in the realm of imagination." And he insisted that nowhere else was there so large and consistent a body of oral tradition about the national and mythical heroes as amongst the Gaels, and especially concerned that the Irish tales and ballads had this peculiarity. The aim of Jacobs's volumes is to present to English children the vision and color, the magic and charm, of the Celtic folk-imagination. While Yeats's volumes show his interest in spiritual beings and his nationalism. Yeats who believes that faith to perpetuate in the three early Cycles of Irish folktales taught by the Druid sees in Tir-na-n'Og, the land of the Sidhe, Plato's and Plotinus' "yonder" when our souls descend whither they return. The Celtic beliefs in rebirth and in the otherworld are connected with beliefs surrounding the burial mounds of the Megalithic people. Among the Celts these tombs were connected with religious usages, chiefly with a cult of gods and fairy-like beings. Beginning with the Ulster Cycle, the sidhe and the Tuatha de Danann merge and become one, and renamed "fairy." A tale entitled "Connla and the Fairy Maiden" chosen by Jacobs is the earliest fairy tale of modern Europe and contains an early account of one of the most characteristic Celtic conceptions, that of the earthly paradise, the isle of Youth, Tir-na-n'Og. And in Fairy Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry there are also new characters like changlings, merrow, leprechauns, banshee, pookas. Samain, the first of November is the beginning of Celtic Year and the biggest festival of Ireland. On the November Eve the sidhe dance with the ghosts and witches make their spells. When the soul has left the body, it is drawn away, sometimes, by fairies. The souls of the dead sometimes take the shapes of animals. And there are 'ghosts' in fairy tales. Yeats chose Lady Wilde's "The Black Lamb" in his volume. And there are 'witches' and 'fairy doctors' in Irish fairy tales. "The Horned Women" of Lady Wilde chosen by the two collectors is the famous tale of witches. Witches and fairy doctors receive their power from opposite dynasties; the witch from evil spirits and her own malignant will; the fairy doctor from the fairies. Samain was adopted by the Christian missionaries to serve their own purposes and renamed "All Souls Day." When the Christian missionaries came to Ireland in the fifth century AD they were able to infiltrate the oral traditions of the Celtic people and infuse Christian beliefs through process of recording the Celtic tales in written form. And the Christian missionaries create the biographies of Christian saints known as "The Legend of the Saint." So there are 'Saints' and 'Priests' in Irish fairy tales. When the pagan gods of Ireland, Tuatha de Danann, robbed of worship and offerings, grew smaller and smaller in the popular imagination, until they turned into the fairies, the pagan heroes grew bigger and bigger, until they turned into the giants. So there are 'giants' in Irish fairy tales like "A Legend of Knockmany." In three major Irish tales cycles (the Mythological cycle, the Ulster Cycle, and the Fenian Cycle) there are so many kings and queens and princesses. Beliefs in the fairy faith, the remnants of an earlier faith than Christianity, have influenced the more modern motifs and characters of Irish Celtic fairy tales.

Building on the readings of Yeats’s esoteric poems, essays, and A Vision, I poses to rethink the ethical dimensions of his occultism, more specifically his reflection on an encounter with the transcendental beings. The need for rearticulation of the role of the ethical, that is the relation to the other gains urgency because the transcendental beings are by nature obscure, indistinct, and indefinite. They resist too much clarification and determination that may reduce their complicated and irreducible beings to distinct concepts. The difficulty, therefore, lies in the question of how Yeats could present the beings in a manner as precise, proper, and rigorous as possible and at the same time he could respect and honor the mode in which the beings conceals themselves in the mystery, by letting them be the mystery that they are. A Vision was the culmination of Yeats’s lifelong wish to relate the divinity of the supernational beings to the human soul. In order not to present God as a personal deity, Yeats says only about the nearest equivalent his system offers to God, the gnomically-named Thirteenth Cone. The Cone is actually a sphere because sufficient to itself, but as seen by man it is a cone. It is more a symbol of the human relationship to the ultimate being than a symbol of that ultimate itself. Otherwise unknowable, the supernatural beings could be evoked by symbols. The symbol's job for Yeats therefore is not, first and foremost, cognition, in the sense of understanding, calculation, and definition, but instead bringing what is other for language and thought into the openness of its alterity and maintaining this alterity against the power of cognitive assimilation. Yeats lets the symbols work up the mind to evoke the world of the supernatural beings, which will remain unknown to those who relay on the evidence of their senses. “The Cold Heaven” gives a good illustration of the human relation to the supernational beings, for it combines Yeats's own personal history with his supernatural vision. Staring at a winter sky, he desperately looks back at where his life has gone, gathering together in a passionate fusion the lacerating memory of his failure with Gonne and his themes of death, ghosts and dreams. Supernatural Songs shows how Ribh's ecstasy in an encounter with the supernatural being not only arises from the contemplation of things vaster than the individual and imperfectly seen but also escapes from the barrenness and shallowness of a too conscious arrangement. "The Spirit Medium" well exemplifies the phenomenon of permeable structure inhabiting different regions of reality simultaneously so that the world of the supernatural being and that of the individual, inside and outside, one side and the other, subject and the other, appear as correlated and overlapped as equal parts of the inhuman symbolic spirit medium.

This paper aims to study Yeats and Nietzsche through Nietzsche’s “Will to Power” in some of Yeats’s poems. In 1902, Yeats first read Nietzsche’s works; through Nietzsche Yeats’s voice turned into a manly voice. An internal conflict appears as a Mask theory in Yeats's poetry. Self and Anti-self (Mask) are two components in the Mask theory. While Will is an internal and subjective self, Mask is a social and objective self. The internal conflicts between Will and Mask determine the human mind. Yeats’s “Mask” and “Ego Dominus Tuus” exemplify Will to Power as an internal conflict. Nietzsche’s Will to Power is a concept of quantity based upon the law of energy preservation refusing causality, the movement ascending and descending and the eternal recurrence of the same. Similarly, Yeat in his A Vision has rewritten a European history based upon the theory of opposite forces in a gyre. He classifies personalities into 28 types based one phases of the moon. Assigned to Phase 12, the phase of heroic man who overcomes himself, Nietzsche is a forerunner; who is fragmentary, violent, and subjective. Perspectivism, a kind of Will to Power, is a plural and relative point of view that is classified into 4 categories; Will to Power as knowledge ("Leda and the Swan"), art ("Ego Dominus Tuus"), love ("Crazy Jane Grown Old Looks at the Dancers"), and truth ("Demon and Beast"). In conclusion, Yeats’s later poems achieve a creative and powerful voice when he thinks and speaks with Nietzsche; in particular, Nietzsche’s Will to Power, a philosophy of Being and Becoming, is echoed in some of Yeats’s later poems.

This paper investigates the images of landscapes in the poetry of W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot, the two greatest poets of the last century. Facing landscapes of the present world and the ancient as well, using his imagination, Yeats maximizes the poetic quality in his poetry. Some of his favorite landscapes, for example, include Innisfree, an islet in Sligo, Thor Ballylee in Coole Park, Byzantium, which delineate clear-cut images of his poetic themes. Either Yeats lived in Sligo with his mother's parents in his childhood, stayed in Lady Gregory’s house in the Coole Park, and owned and lived in the tower, Thor Ballylee in summer; or he admired the old Byzantium that he idealizes in his supreme poems. They serve as optimum metaphors for his poetry, making his poetry simple but rich in its imagery. On the other hand, Eliot focuses on delineating the life of modern man in his poetry by using cities, including London, Boston, Paris, and St. Louis. The people of the cities are being described as faithless and purposeless with their mind void. His depiction of the city further represents the whole modern civilization. The big city is the backdrop of such infertile imagery of modern man.

This paper focuses on the problems of poor imagination presented in the later poems of Wallace Stevens and W. B. Yeats. Being older and being barren of ideas, both poets feel the bitter anguish about their poetry writing. In his later poem, “Of Mere Being,” Stevens continues his endeavor to picture the ‘abstract’ or true reality but fails to accomplish “a supreme fiction” that is his own ultimate form of poetry. Yeats also seriously doubts of his own capabilities and laments the lack of theme as well as of subject matter in “The Circus Animals’ Desertion.” Although the imagination is sterile, however, the desire itself does not wither away totally. The elderly Stevens simply was not blessed with creative imagination in his later years. Hence, only the “mere” reality repetitively and gallantly appears in “Of Mere Being” and other later works. Yeats also does not give up but undertakes to write significant poems with integrity.

Yeats’s studies of ancient myths, legends and occult tradition form a part of his artistic enterprise to quest for the occult wisdom and reaffirm the power of occult imagination. His work is so deeply immersed in the supernatural that it intends to regenerate the modern world by reopening ancient spiritual wellsprings and reviving primal religious sensibilities. His interest in occultism did most to create occult images and symbols as signs of imaginative salvation. Yeats’s mystical lore helped him ascertain the spiritual reality within human consciousness and use magical symbols as a means of calling up visions. Art for Yeats is about the “wisdom of the daemonic image” which holds for a moment of illumination the warring opposites of flesh and soul. Yeats created occult images of spiritual intensity to convey the quality of the Unity of Being out of the increasingly scientific and secular culture of the modern age. His occult images create the rich texture of his poetry that examines the spiritual situation of modern humanity.

The paper searches parallels between English and Korean poetry as represented by Kim Chunsoo and Kim Jonggil, two of modern and contemporary poets in relation to W. B. Yeats. It clarifies the validity of such a comparative study by showing the interrelationship in the visual art, for it is there physically to see, as exemplified by the giving and receiving of Picasso and Matisse through their works. Even though it is not that easy in poetry, it is nevertheless possible to relate such relationship in it. Yeats has been a great influence on English and American poets; and a large number of researches and studies have been done. But Yeats has not been compared with Korean poets, in part because Korean and English are totally different languages. But as this study has shown, this kind of study could give benefits to both scholars and writers as well. This paper selects two of Kim Chunsoo’s early poems to compare with Yeats’s parallels. The fact is, Yeats’s poems seem to have had influence on the early Kim. Kim's poetry is different, though. What we could benefit from this study is that Korean poets need not worry about influences from great foreign poets. Understanding foreign language poetry helps Korean poets enrich their own poetry by learning what their true self is, what language Korean is; Kim must have learned that from reading Yeats. The paper takes and analyzes Kim Jonggil in relation with Yeats. Kim Jonggil is different from Kim Chunsoo; Kim Jonggil teaches Yeats and other poets in English. But what interests me is he is far different from other Korean poets. He seems to have transcended foreign influences, not to mention that he has outgrown Yeats and other English poets. Two of Kim’s poems are elaborated in relation with Yeats’s. I deal with Kim’s supreme poem with one of Yeats’s best. Kim’s quality compares well with Yeats’s, but his poetry itself is different from Yeats’s.

Heaney’s poems seem to build on a tripartite cyclical structure which comprises home-leaving, wandering and home-coming. This structure is thought to symbolize explorations for identity and for the limitlessness and profundity of the universe. And also, this tripartite cyclical structure is thought to symbolize perfection and holiness. And this structure symbolizes the embracement of the dynamic and cyclical phenomena of our life. In Death of A Naturalist and Door into Dark the poet explores his own identity or his community's one; in Wintering Out, he shows the resistant spirit against the violence of Northern Ireland. In North, the persona finally recognizes that he should leave his home community stricken with violence in order to live in peace and to be a free artist. Field Work and Station Island, I think, belong to the stage of wandering: Field Work shows his new aspect as a naturalist, attempting to settle down in Wicklow, the new shelter. Station Island shows the last destination of his wandering, identifying himself with Sweeney, the symbol of the free artist and finally he comes to fly as a free universal artist. The poetical works since The Haw Lantern show some aspects of journey back; The Haw Lantern lays out a new blueprint for the Irish Republic as a conscientious country; and Seeing Things searches for the Irish spiritual omphalos that the Irish people has been dreamed of, by experimenting a new-style poetry for expressing light, song, freedom and equality. My last conclusion is that, although Heaney who had explored his own and his community's identities could not but leave his home country to write poems in peace and wander in a sense of sin, he has moved toward Uisneach: the perfection and holiness-full Irish utopian land and also the omphalos of Irish psyche.