As Maud Gonne had been regarded as one of the most important factors in Yeats’s life and literature, this study aims to analyze her images reflected in the poet’s poems which were published in 1910s and 1920s. Maud Gonne is presented as a political icon of that time in Ireland in Yeats’s poems. Unlike his early poems, where Maud Gonne is idealized as a goddess, a heroic figure of unbounded nobility and courage, Yeats presents her as a tragic warrior who devotes herself to political activities for violence and destruction in this period. At the same time, Yeats shows his holding back of approving Gonne’s political role of female warrior. The number of poems related to Maud Gonne also is decreased when Yeats realizes that Maud Gonne devoted herself too much on the political matters.
Yeats invents his own system of metaphors in the poem “Leda and the Swan.” The system urges Yeats to drive his poetry on unknown fields. Rather than following in the well worn tracks of Greek mythology, he tries to idealize a form of poetry that looks brief, yet carefully formed and worded: a metapoetic strategy by using related vocabulary at which he seems to excel. In the first stanza, he claims that Zeus visits Leda as a form of Swan and vividly draws in passionate language a picture of sexual intercourse by his sudden blow on Leda sleeping peacefully. His action looks like a rape on the surface, yet possibly interpreted in a different way, that is adultery between a god and a married woman; yet it thus turns out to be a historical moment worldly and spiritually at the moment of making love. Such words symbolizing as metaphors the relations of Lead and Swan in mythic stories are carefully crafted and allusively materialized to form a metapoetic allegory: a poetry that uses a system of related metaphors, violence and sex, to reflect implicitly on history in poetry and on its poetic program. Whether or not Yeats invents this metapoetic strategy, his poetic symbolism is strongly characteristic of his own connection to Greek symbolism as in mythic stories. Such a metapoetic approach as found in the poem can help us understand much about his own values on humanity, including why Yeats chooses to rewrite about such images, ideas, and poetic patterns as shown in Greek stories, and why−as in his discussion of violence and love put together in physical and spiritual beauty−he puts into question mythic literature and its literary criticism of love and battle just in the poem imitating Greek tales.
This study is an attempt to analyze Yeats’s early poetry in the light of his theory of the mask. For this purpose the writer of the present study has first proposed to define the ‘mask’ to investigate the theory and has reached the conclusion that the ‘mask’ is a Yeatsian term for an ideal image of life which is always opposite to the natural self or the natural world, and the theory of the mask has three aspects−aesthetic, moral, and philosophical−according to the role of the mask. The aesthetic meaning of the theory demonstrates Yeats’s argument on the nature, the source, and the touchstone of a work of art: art is the embodiment of the writer’s mask of life and his inner struggle between mask and life sets him to his creative work; the quality of a work depends upon the expression of this tragic war. And all the more important, Yeats’s strong belief in polarity of the two terms of conflict is clarified. The study of Yeats’s early poetry in terms of his theory of the mask has concluded that Yeats’s early mask is the very transcendent realm which Yeats’s early symbolism proposes to evoke and the main symbols used to express this ideal world are the images of Arcadian island across the sea, rose, the Irish mythic world and Maud Gonne; and the synthesis of Yeats's theory of the mask and symbolism in his early poetry causes some distortions in both his theory of the mask and symbolism. The nature of his transcendent world is conveyed not by the symbols but by the imperfect realities in spite of his strong belief that “divine essence” can only be evoked by the symbols; the nature of this ideal world has also been distorted: it is not the super reality lying beyond reality like Mallarme’s but only an ideal place where all the impurities and imperfections of the real world are removed or corrected. As for the theory of the mask, polarity, the most important basis of the theory, has been impaired: only the value and the love of the ideal world is emphasized, whereas those of the earthly life are restrained or its weaknesses and painfulness are stated to describe the ideal world.
This article discusses A Vision so it could be of some help to reading some of Yeats's metaphysical poems. It is true that some of his metaphysical poems are so beautiful but that it is not easy to grasp what they really want to say to the readers, and how and why they appear so haunting and attracting to the general readers. Equally important is that the book itself is a poem of supreme beauty. There are two versions of A Vision. The first version Yeats privately published in 1925. His wife Georgie was a medium, through whom Yeats had talked with his teachers/gods for seven years; as a result, he created a system that classifies man into 28 types following the 28 phases of the moon, made a theory of reincarnation, a history of the world, based on the cyclical and antithetical nature of the moon and the gyre. The second version became a new book. Yeats revised the first version, deleting, adding, polishing much of it, and published it two years before he died. While composing the first book, Yeats said he did not read philosophy, because he did not want himself to be under the influence of the philosophy and distort what his teachers said through the automatic writing. He did read philosophy, however, for four years, to understand his wife's automatic writing accurately, when he revised it for the second publication. Yeats questioned what he had invented, and further contemplated big questions intellectuals of his time raised. All of these efforts grew to be the book of the century that is most elaborate, most abstract and most concrete as well. It is both a book of beauty itself and a book for reading his poetry and plays and his thoughts.
This article surveys the correlation between Yeats’s translation of the two Oedipus plays of Sophocles, Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus, and Yeats’s own plays so that the development of Yeats as dramatist may be explored. In the first place, this article examines why Yeats had the long-standing interest in staging Sophocles’ tragedy. The reasons are explained in relation to Yeats’s tragic tendency and political purpose. Then the long and complex process of completing Yeats’s Oedipus project is pursued mainly on the basis of Clark and McGuire’s W. B. Yeats: The Writing of “Sophocles’ King Oedipus” (1989). In particular, this article concentrates on the time when Yeats decided to write his own version of Oedipus and the reason why the project had a long dormant period before it restarted and finally was completed in 1927. In the final place, the effects the Oedipus project had upon Yeats’s own plays are studied through a comparative analysis between Yeats’s translation of the two Oedipus plays and his other plays. On Baile’s Strand (1904) and The Herne’s Egg (1938) are treated to figure out the similarities between Oedipus and Yeats’s heroes such as Cuchulain and Congal. In addition, The Resurrection (1931) and Purgatory (1939) are dealt with to reveal the mysterious death of the old Oedipus at Colonus and the new perspective of death and old age it offers to Yeats. In conclusion, this article claims the Oedipus project made significant influence upon Yeats as playwright, so that the result pervaded nearly the whole plays of Yeats.
The purpose of this study is to trace Yeats’s efforts toward an ultimate reconciliation of the contrary forces of human experience as they are reflected in his later poetry written Beyond Byzantium, and to explore the relationship between existential awareness and artistic vitality. Though Yeats reached Byzantium in 1927, from The Wanderings of Oisin to “Byzantium” he yearned for stasis and release, and thus sought the solace to be found in never-never lands ranging from the woods of Arcady and Tir-nan-Oge to the golden boughs of Byzantium. Yet a disquieted romantic and an unaccommodated man, he returned to the living world of unfinished men and the dross of their mortal pain. The world of the “dying generations,” for all its corruption and impermanence, is the place where Yeats, after much sailing, finally dropped anchor. Yeats ran his course between the extremities implicit in “Perfection of the life, or of the work,” and by the end of his career he took his stand with the claims of his art and the passions that make it possible. “Tragic Gaiety,” the hero’s rising above evil fortune and circumstance, is at once the matrix and the pinnacle of his final, transforming vision, and Yeats’s most significant legacy to our “tired” and “hysterical” age. Thus Yeats’s great achievement lies in his exposition of the artist’s will to transcend phenomenal limitations, and in the symbolic identification of creator and created. “Bitter and Gay,” the dominant notes of most of the poetry of Yeats’s last years, lay the tragic scene beyond Byzantium, and it was there that he finally reached a reconciliation with “Time.” Not transcendence, however, but the simple triumph of trying to be a total man was Yeats’s final accomplishment. After all the anguish and the judgements, at the close of his life he repented nothing, and could cry “Rejoice” because it is only through the despair born of tragedy that we can achieve true gaiety and unity in empathy with humanity. That was the joyful voice of a man who knew how to create out of destruction. This wholeness of vision which Yeats finally attained is the prime concern of this study.
Yeats wrote two poems on Byzantium: one is “Sailing to Byzantium” written in 1926 and the other is “Byzantium” written in 1930. The two poems are called the Byzantium Poems. In both poems, the reality and the ideal coexist, as Yeats himself said that “Each age unwinds the thread another age had wound, and it amuses one to remember that before Phidias, and his westward-moving art, Persia fell, and that when full moon came round again, amid eastward-moving thought, and brought Byzantine glory, Rome fell; and that at the outset of our westward-moving Renaissance Byzantium fell; all things dying each other’s life, living each other’s death.” What Yeats said about Byzantium as a symbolic city can be said about Ireland where the poet himself lived. That means he depicted the same world in dual perspectives. He said if he were to choose a city where he would live a month, he would pick up Byzantium a little before Justinian opened St. Sophia and closed the Academy of Plato. The reason is that religious, aesthetic and practical life were one in the town and at that time. We can say that what Yeats described in the Byzantium poems is the world where religious, aesthetic and practical life are one and the same.
In this study, I will focus on “Byzantium” and explore how the poem mirrors the essence of Zen Meditation. Not only is the poem patterned after the progressive procedure of Zen meditation, but they also reflect the fundamental concerns of Zen meditation, such as the problem of duality, the concept of time, and an aspiration for freedom from the limitation of this life. These features of Zen meditation are expressed through the use of specific symbols, the implications of setting, and various poetic techniques. The purpose of this study is to provide another way to read the poem by analyzing it in the context of Zen meditation. The structures of the poem are loosely patterned after a typical process of meditation through which the meditator reaches Unity of Being. The process of Zen meditation is nicely depicted in the ten pictures titled “The Boy and the Ox,” each of which shows the gradual development of the meditator’s search for his won nature or Buddhahood. For the convenience of my discussion, I will simplify the ten stages of Zen meditation to four−confusion, immersion, union and return−which, I believe, cover all the important procedures in the meditation. The first stanza of “Byzantium” exhibits some typical features related to its meditative scheme, in which we can feel the sense of confusion on the part of the meditator or poetic persona. In other words, the meditator sets out his meditative journey to search for an answer for his sense of confusion or clear it. The second to the fourth stanzas are equivalent to the second stage (immersion) and the third stage (union or seeing the vision) of meditation. The last stanza parallels the final stage of Zen meditation (return). In “Byzantium,” we see the reflection of Zen meditation. The structural patterns of the meditative poems generally correspond to the four stages of Zen meditation: confusion, immersion, union or seeing the vision of the unity, and return. Yeats’ use of poetic techniques such as line scheme, use of number symbolism, and the arrangement of stanzas are closely associated with the meditative scheme of the poems. In addition, the major concern of the poems is reminiscent of that of Zen meditation in that they confront the problem of duality, which sets up the occasion for meditation. The agony of duality results from the concept of time. Thus, the meditator tries to reconcile the dichotomous elements, resulting in the state of freedom from time. More than anything else, the purpose of Yeats’ meditative poem lies in the poet’s aspiration for self-awakening, as in Zen meditation. The poem is Yeats’ record of his life-long efforts to meet his “fourth self” or Great Self.
This paper discusses perfectionist writers W. B. Yeats and James Joyce. To compare how they worked slowly and creatively toward completing a work, I take two works by Yeats and Joyce, two of their best works. Yeats tends to work on his poems and plays continuously, even after they have been published. This paper looks at the rewriting of “Leda and the Swan” in several different stages, in order to see how the poem gather intensity and art, as an exemplification of what he did as a literary artist. Yeats’s attitude toward art and his literary style can be compared to the traits of art, and his literary style can be compared to that of the young artist depicted in A Portrait. In fact the young artist Stephen can be seen as Joyce the artist, and the paper discusses Stephen who grows linguistically and artistically competent. Yeats and Joyce are not merely Romantic writers; they were determined to develop new art and bring it to the highest perfection. And indeed they have achieved it in their works respectively.
This article discusses a consistent blend of autobiographical retrospection, metaphysical speculations, the passion of an old man raging against the approaching night. Many of these are similar to those in his earlier works, but art cannot be enlivened until it is kept in touch with “the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart” as in “The Circus Animals’ Desertion.” In “High Talk,” Yeats resorts to the determination of the artist in a degenerate world. Using a circus metaphor, he demands the artist put on high stilts so he may catch the eye of the audience. He needs the stilts, now being incapable of the brilliant fantasy of past youth. The poet is Malachi Stilt-Jack, the maker of metaphors in art, but the walker upon stilts, though an eye-catching figure, is an absurd posturing creature in his “timber-toes.” The image of “its rag and bone” in “An Acre of Grass” is connected to the image of “old bones, old rags” in “The Circus Animals’ Desertion.” It is a recurrent theme of old age in Last Poems. Much of what has been noble and great is gone; what remains is raging of the flesh. Only memories of the past remain to the old man, physically exhausted. “An Acre of Grass” looks back on the major poetic themes in Yeats’s later life.
The ‘debunking literature’ can contribute to improving the society by revealing the social maladies, lightening the truth and exposing the evil to the world, whose genuine power lies in digging the truth even often running the risk of death. This paper aims to confirm why the poems describing the on-going famines in North Korea and the past ones in Ireland belong to debunking literature and what power or effect they have or they are expected to have. For this, I established some hypothesis through my reading on famines and examined the effects Irish literature on the Irish Great Famine has brought to the development of the Irish Society in advance. And through my investigation, I could confirm that North Korea’s refugee poet, Mr. Jang Jin Sung exposed extreme poverty and misery by contrasting the dying and innocent people with the cruel despotic regime sometimes in a strongly direct way and that the Irish famine poems of Mangan, Yeats and Heaney focused on the Great Britain's hypocritical and indifferent colonial policy on the Irish starvation-stricken people in a roundabout way. Moreover, reading famine poems of the two nations led me to compare North Korea’s famine poems with those of Ireland: they look similar in the respect that they portray the miserable scenes surrounding a mass of population who died of famines and spotlight political neglect as the main reason, but look very much different in the respect that, in a sharp contrast with any of Irish poets, North Korea’s refugee poet, Mr Jang Jin Sung, ran the risk of even his death to expose the despot regime that slaughtered, and is still slaughtering, its own people that has no liberty to escape from the starvation. My last conclusion is that the courageous poet, Jang’s pains will lead to the betterment of North Korea’s human rights just as Irish famine poems have influenced the development of Irish politics, history and culture deeply.