As William Butler Yeats is one of the greatest modern English poet Ireland produced, James Joyce is one of the greatest modern English novelist born in Ireland. Yeats used the legends of Ireland as poetic material and established his own philosophical scheme with the help of his wife George Hyde Lees’s automatic writing. James Joyce used the legend of the ancient work as a base of his novel’s structure. In Ulysses, he used Homer’s Odyssey as a means of giving unity to the seemingly disorganized modern citizens’s lives. Joyce himself disclosed the scheme of Ulysses and all the chapters corresponded to the episodes in Homer’s Odyssey. Chapter 4 of Ulysses corresponds to the Calypso episode in Odyssey. Though the Calypso episode lasts 24 days and chapter 4 deals with the accidents happened in only 45 minutes, there are lots of parallels between the two stories. The relationship between Calypso and Odysseus parallels that of Bloom and his wife Molly. What Bloom does in that time parallels what Odysseus does during 24 days. In conclusion, we can safely say that Joyce adapted the Calypso episode very well to the modern Odysseus, Bloom and his adventure in the modern city, Dublin.

In December, 2007 the present writer wrote a paper on the errors in interpretation in which I raised an objection to the two Korean professors' translation of ‘hole’ which appear in the first stanza of “Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931” into Korean 구멍. Instead, the present writer insisted that ‘hole’ means ‘a deep place in a body of water’, one of the definitions of the word as described in Webster's Third New International Dictionary in that the meaning harmonizes well with the whole poem. But in May, 2009, Mr. Kim, Sangmoo, Professor Emeritus of Young Nam University read his paper to the effect that the present writer was wrong. His paper subjected the present writer to a thorough examination into the matter. In the course of close examination, the present writer came upon a book entitled A Yeats Dictionary. The present writer consulted the book for some hint leading to the solution of the present issue. At last the present writer found what he wanted in its entry, Coole Park. It read, "The lake further fascinated Yeats because its only drain was a narrow subterranean passage which caused the lake to double and treble its size in winter." All quess-works are needed no more. The present writer had to own that he made a mistake by his hasty conclusion. The ‘hole’ was the only drain in Coole lake, so that its translation into ‘구멍’ in Korean does not mar the meaning of the poem. In addition, this research proved fruitful in some other way. In the process of solving the above-mentioned point in question, the present writer faced a problematical and arbitrary way of Prof. Kim's presenting his argument in his paper. This gave the present writer a motivation to suggest, although in a crude way, a desirable mode of presenting arguments in paper.

Colors in the poems are non-verbal communication. Colors in the poetry have symbolism and color meanings that go beyond ink. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to investigate how Yeats chooses colors for his poems and how those colors are related to his poetic imagination. Yeats uses many colors in his poems in order to strengthen his poetic themes. The color that he uses frequently in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats is red. The color red is often related to the word blood in several of his poems. In Yeats’s poems, the color red and blood are connected to Ireland and the Irish people’s devotion to their country. In his poems Yeats tries to praise the beauty of Ireland and those people who dedicated their lives to Ireland. For example, in “To the Rose upon the Rood of Time,” “The Rose Tree,” “To Ireland in the Coming Times” and so on, Yeats uses the red and blood imagery associated with Ireland in order to exalt his own country and his own people just as Christians praise the red blood of Jesus Christ shed on the cross for their salvation. Finally, grasping the meaning of various colors used in his poetry will help us understand his poems more broadly.

This paper examines Yeats's idea of hero and heroism in his Cuchulain plays. Cuchulain is the mythological champion of the ancient province of Ulster. He is the protagonist in a cycle of plays written by Yeats over a span of thirty-five years. Cuchulain became for Yeats a personal symbol for the heroic as well as the national ideal. He was not only his mask or alter ego but also the chief representative of that heroic age to which Yeats wished Ireland to aspire. Yeats significantly altered the Celtic legend to serve his dramatic purposes. He was concerned more with the nature of heroism than with the character and the life of the Ulster champion. So he was not interested in the hero's superhuman feats of arms or bravery which his source had emphasized. Instead he wished his countrymen to learn the hero's spiritual virtues: the unyielding spirit of challenge in At the Hawk's Well; selfless courage and sacrifice for his country in The Green Helmet; the comparison and contrast between the actual anti-heroic world and the heroic ideal in On Baile's Strand; true love and self-sacrifice of his wife in The Only Jealousy of Emer; forgiveness, mercy, unselfishness, and transcendence of the fear of death in The Death of Cuchulain. Cuchulain's heroism consists in a combination of daring, gaiety, strength and beauty, and he is a free man, a challenger who, whether he wins or loses a specific battle, is ultimately victorious over himself and over others. The hero is freed from every form of hesitation, both moral and physical. The essence of Yeats's heroism is sacrifice and the creative joy separated from fear.

This paper is an attempt to understand George Yeats: who she was, how she lived, and what kind of relationship she had with the poet W. B. Yeats. Based on the recent biographical and critical studies of Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, Brenda Maddox, Ann Saddlemyer, and Margaret Mills Harper, the present writer tries to show that George Yeats was not only the devoted wife of W. B. Yeats and mother of their two children, but also the poet's literary and spiritual collaborator. The first introductory part of the paper deals with George Yeats's life until she married W. B. Yeats. Her birth and education, the first meeting with W. B. Yeats, and the establishing of a close relationship which, strengthened by common interest in occultism, led to their marriage in October 1917, are briefly surveyed. The paper then discusses the problem which arose from Yeats's unresolved sexual love for Iseult Gonne, and shows how George Yeats solved it by trying the automatic script at their honeymoon hotel. The automatic script, which saved George and W. B. Yeats at the critical moment, and dominated the early years of their married life, is mainly discussed in the next part of the paper. The paper first describes how it started, and then discusses the main issues related to it: why George did it, and whether it was "her hoax, a joint self-deception, or daimonic intervention" (Saddlemye xix), and how it affected W. B. Yeats's life and work. In order to see how W. B. Yeats expressed his feeling and thought about the automatic script in his poems, the writer of the paper reads "Solomon to Sheba," "Solomon and the Witch," and "The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid." The last part of the paper deals with George Yeats's life after the automatic script and the "sleeps" ended in summer 1922. Unlike the exciting and sexually intimate life of early five years, the later long years of her married life were very tiring and "problem-ridden." The paper discusses the major problems she had to face as wife of the great poet and mother of two children, and describes how she "lived through it with self-possession, with generosity, with something like nobility" (Elllmann xxviii).

Eliot seems to have been much impressed by Yeats's poetics and poetic techniques, in particular the union of emotion and reason. Not only is Yeats a supreme Romantic - he is a poet of mysticism. To Eliot, Yeats is not just a great poet, but a great craftsman; Yeats's reputation as such a poet has remained strong, from the beginning up until now, as Eliot has foreseen. In Yeats's works, there are both aesthetic and mysterious elements, and just as we could call him a romantic-mystic poet. Eliot thinks highly of Yeats's pure poetry, with poetics based on the principle of art for art's sake. He praises Yeats as a great poet-craftsman, as we have seen in his works above. Yeats has been under the influence of French symbolists's poetic techniques, such as those of Baudelaire, Mallareme,. Neval, Verlaine. In Yeats's works, there is their influence.

Yeats and Blake consistently used rhetorical counter-questions whenever they expressed spiritual ambivalence of human existence throughout their poetry. Although Yeats was influenced by Blake, he explored different subject matters to express diverse ambivalence. While Yeats focused on ambivalent fusion of spiritual and physical conflicts, Blake focused on ambivalent integration of theological, social, and moral conflicts. Yeats used rhetorical counter-questions to express the ambivalent unseen reality in "The Second Coming," "Among School Children," "Leda and Swan," and "Meditations in Time of Civil War." "Beast" in "The Second Coming," "dancer" in "Among School Children," Helen in "Leda and Swan," and "dream" in "Towards Break of Day" connote fusion images of opposing objects to evoke many aspects of one thing by using rhetorical counter-question. Also, Blake used rhetorical counter-questions to express the ambivalent spiritual, social, and ethical reality in "Tyger" and "A Little Boy Lost." Especially, Blake qualified spiritual ambivalence through various images of fire in "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" in that fire includes associated meanings of heaven and hell. Most of Blake's spiritual poems often begins with a rhetorical counter-question and ends with a rhetorical counter-question to strengthen the significance of ambivalent archetypal cycle. Although both poets differ from each other on human spiritual value, they used rhetorical counter-questions to free from religious, political, moral, social, and traditional repression in their poetry. In this sense, men are making meanings through their mystic imagination which is free from religion and tradition rather than scientific reason. Therefore, Yeats and Blake used rhetorical counter-questions to qualify open aspects of human imagination and to complete archetypal counter cycle.

This paper aims at presenting the postcolonial aspects of William Butler Yeats’s poetry. The term ‘postcolonial’ means not only ‘the anti-colonial’ but ‘the hybridity’. Leaning on the recent studies such as those of Edward Said, Jahan Ramazani and Homi Bhabha on Yeats and Irish literature, this study investigates the multiple aspects of Yeats as a postcolonial poet. First of all in this paper, Yeats’s complex reaction to the two consecutive wars in Irish history is examined thoroughly. The two wars accelerate the process of decolonization in Ireland, and after 1920s the country enters an at least partially postcolonial state by succeeding in reaching home rule. Yeats writes two important poems about the wars, “Meditations in Time of Civil War” and “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen.” Because of his familial background as an Anglo-Irish Protestant, the poet is unable to wholly support either side of the conflicts. Whether in the war of the colonized against the colonizer (the Anglo-Irish war), or in the battle between the colonized themselves (Republicans vs. Free State supporters), his position is far from complete support for either party. Just as the speaker of “Meditations in Time of Civil War” feels sympathy for the fighting troops or ponders whether or not to join them, it is not certain as to which side he would lend his allegiance. This lack of certainty and the divided loyalties is another sign of his conflict in the postcolonial position. His dual loyalties are well represented in terms of the features of postcoloniality, namely, hybridity and ambivalence. During the colonial state and the partially postcolonial state, Yeats’s involvement with Irish politics had never been static or straightforward or comfortable. His writings more often represent conflicted responses to the issues of Irish nationalism and British colonialism. Therefore, his body of work, his political beliefs and his involvement in the anti-colonial struggle require the serious consideration for such concepts as resistance, tension, ambivalence, and hybridity. Therefore, my main contention is that the tensions and contradictions inherent in Yeats’s later poetry can best be explored in the context of his postcoloniality. Yeats’s contradictory and uncertain attitudes and stances cannot simply be defined by leaning to ready-made political labels.

In A Vision, Yeats provides multiple trans-temporal (crossing different periods in history) and trans-national(crossing different nations) collage of “the glance characteristic of a civilization in its final phase,” and provides different images of eyes for each period. Each of these images is related to a certain point between concernful dealing with the world and the vision of the infinite world. Each image of the gaze characteristic of sculpture represents a civilization, and constitutes a “discontinuous image” which connotes “the symbolic message.” In fact, Yeats reveals each image of the eye as a fragment or stasis of a moment of the spiritual eye, and at the same time as the representation of Yeats's intention to quest for the Unity of Culture, the “vast design” of his transnational poetics. The objective of this paper is to trace the trajectory of Yeats's poetics and rhetoric. My contention is that Yeats reveals his major shift from the poetics to the rhetoric in the midst of the multi-level “twists and turns” which mark an important manifestation of the process of transmigration toward the Unity of Culture, and I argue that Yeats’s quest for the Unity of Culture manifest a transnational poetics. Yeats’s poetic development manifests the on-going process of contestation and fragmentation on the bridge between the poetics and the rhetoric. The bridge is a site of turbulent aporia site in which duplication of contestation creates a simultaneous centripetal and centrifugal movement, comingled with multiplication of fragmentation. Between “Magic” essay and A Vision, there is a missing link to establish the so-called “linguistic turn” in the career of Yeats the transnational poet/theorist. Yeats in his Per Amica Silentia Lunae already conceived the doubling intertext of intentionality as an anchoring center of the breakthrough out of the dilemma of the theory of magic. In fact, what Yeats has done in Per Amica Silentia is to create conflict, tension, and equilibrium between the theory of magic and the theory of the linguistic turn, thereby rupturing the inauthentic theory of correspondence and establishing the foreground of the authentic concept of correspondence in terms of Othering. The Only Jealousy of Emer is the dramatic manifestion of Yeats’s linguistic turn in the speech of the characters in relation to the desire of the Other. My focus here in this play is rather the role of the multiple masks which represent the nature of the Other as well as the process of Othering. The Other has been represented by the multiple characters’ masks such as those of Bricriu (The Figure of Cuchulain), Fand (Woman of the Sidhe), The Ghost of Cuchulain, Emer, Eithne Inguba. As a unified vision of Yeats’s own diachronic and synchronic transnational poetics, A Vision can be seen in terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s “desiring- production.” Opposed to the (negative) Lacanian dialectic of lack and desire, Deleuze and Guattari propose a theory of “desiring-production,” which they define as a “pure multiplicity, that is to say, an affirmation that is irreducible to any sort of unity.” If we re-consider A Vision as a desiring-machine that is connected to other desiring-machines, we deterritorialize the perspective which constructs lack as the centre of subjectivity, thereby reterritorializing subjectivity as a network of multiplicities. The gaze of the writing subjects in A Vision become autonomous, creating automatic writing and automatic speech. Then, A Vision which is given for the metaphors for poetry and poetry achieves its being in language. In short, Yeats has established a transnational poetics which traces its poetics of the Other and Othering back to the poetics and the rhetoric of the linguistic turn, a turn in which poetry exists in language and turned toward an inner reality.

In A Vision Yeats combines Christianity with elements as disparate as theosophy, astrology, neoPlatonism, spiritualism, the magic and Cabbalistic traditions, the work of writers such as Swedenborg, Boehme and Blake. The end result, such as “Ego Dominus Tuus” and “The Second Coming”, is a unitary system in which Yeats defines his ideas on history, religion and art. “The Second Coming” depicts an apocalyptic scene, and the advent of a “rough beast” oxymoronically slouching towards Bethlehem “to be born.” In accordance with Yeats’s view on cosmic and historical cycles, which will be touched upon in this essay, it is generally regarded as prophesizing the end of the “twenty centuries” of the Christian Era. It embodies or foreshadows the revelation of the character of the age to come, completely antithetical to that of the Christian Era, which, in Yeats’s mind, was nearing its conclusion. The poem’s title, its biblically allusive infrastructure, and its Latin evocation of a “Spiritus mundi” (namely, “soul of the world”) disclose its intention to cast an appeal on the “collective unconscious” of the entire Christian world Such a coexistence of opposite forces would also conform perfectly with Yeats’s view of Unity of Being, which entails a detached and simultaneous outlook on both Good and Evil. Yeats seems to have accessed this “antithetical” state of consciousness in “The Second Coming”, where the triumphal Christian connotations evoked by the title are offset by the terrifying scenario in the poem, which describes what is in fact a reverse apocalypse and the coming of the Antichrist. On its most evident plane, Yeats’s “The Second Coming” is, obviously, the description of an apocalyptic (or anti-apocalyptic) scene.

I have made an attempt to read the tower imagery in some of Yeats’s middle and last poems. The tower is a key symbol in his poetry. He purchased a Norman tower in 1917 and moved into it to live in summers from 1919. Since then, it had become an emblem of his profound philosophy in his philosophical poetry. I read both the tower poems and their social and historical backgrounds to understand his works more deeply. I also study the way his tower poems reflect Neoplatonic symbolism and intellectual symbolism. The tower symbolizes the poet's spiritual and historical changes in his life; at one time, the tower was a romantic and stable place for the newlywed Yeatses; at others, it served as a retreat at his critical moments and as a place for philosophical contemplation on life and death; eventually it became the poet himself and the eternal symbol of his art as well.

In this paper, I argue that W. B. Yeats’s pursuit of universalism was rekindled by his rediscovery of the East through Tagore. Yeats’s political experiences during the 1910s also influenced his fascination with universalism. I will first discuss the significance of Yeats’s fascination with Tagore in relation to his rediscovery of the importance of East, particularly India, not only for spiritual reasons, but also for political reasons. That is, Tagore ultimately gave Yeats an opportunity to see India as a place to reconcile his split allegiance to both Romanticism and nationalism, and to art and politics. The East, for Yeats, is the place to swerve from his Romantic predecessors for political reasons. At this time, a return to East was especially important to him because it also offered a psychological vindication for his political setback—being attacked for his anti-nationalism—during the Playboy riots. That is, the pursuit of Eastern values, particularly Indian values, became his way of fighting colonialism, as well as for finding spiritual wholeness. By the time Yeats returned to the East, Yeats also began to witness the most turbulent and dramatic political events of his life such as the 1916 Easter Rising, the Irish and English War, and the Irish Civil War, which Yeats viewed as the culmination of the hatred between political groups and parties. His rediscovery of Eastern values through Tagore and his political experiences at that time slowly led Yeats to develop a concept of universalism: the unity of East and West. In other words, Yeats’s continuous movement towards universalism during this period was the necessary and inevitable course to deal with his political experiences: his psychological need to purify the bitterness and hatred Irish politics breeds into his mind, and his need to offer a more inclusive political vision to the Irish politicians who fight out of hatred of opposing parties. What Yeats basically wants to do by pursuing universalism is to create a citizen of the universe whose consciousness transcends the distinction between one and many, present and past, and East and West. Poems such as “The Double Vision of Michael Robartes,” “Sailing to Byzantium,” “Among School Children,” and “Byzantium,” written after 1919 express Yeats’s universalist idea of reconciling East and West employing a meditative scheme. It is unmistakable that all three poems encapsulate Yeats’s universal consciousness, but we also see that they are also tinged by Yeats’s skepticism about the transcendental state, as well as about universalism, in one way or another. Yeats’s doubt about universalism betrays his conflicting political agenda: his belief in the Anglo-Irish aristocratic government. Looking at other poems (“The Wild Swans at Cool,” “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory,” “An Irish Airman foresees his Death,” “A Prayer for my Daughter”) published in the same period reveal his covert allegiance to the Anglo-Irish aristocratic tradition.

I look at the images of Maud Gonne in Yeats's "Bronze Head." The bronze head is a sculpture made by Lawrence Campbell, which is in the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin. When Yeats saw it, he must be shocked; she is old, and yet she looks "magnificent." In the bronze work, Yeats sees Maud Gonne as "human, superhuman," and "supernatural," as well. He puts down all that occurs to him, from the very first encounter, when "she walks like a goddess," not without wildness, though, to the image of Cathleen-like soul, to the image of her being supernatural with a sterner eye. All this enriching vision is made possible in this last poem of his; it is a conclusion to his poetry that is a history of a great heart craving for life for anther great heart; it is the best paean dedicated to a Goddess in his heart.