Yeats constantly sought to express in his poetry the images that he actually felt and experienced in the real world. The images in his poetry are the reflection of his dream and ideal, and they are “realities” of the real world transformed through his own imagination. In his early poetry, the images often tend to be illusory and mystical as they depend on materials of legends and myths. But in his middle period, the tendency to be illusory and mystical has gradually vanished, and his poems begin to become realistic, based on materials of common life. But, to me, this change, from the ideal to the real, is not dichotomous. For Yeats, Real and Ideal seemed to be inseparably related to each other under their mutual influence. That is, he sought the realization of Ideal while he didn’t forget Real in his own Ideal because he knew very well that forgetting his Real meant loosing his identity. Furthermore, his poetry shows a dialectical development that becomes a harmony of Real and Ideal by overcoming the conflict between them and by positively accepting the reality of the world. Finally, Yeats created a sublimated reality through internal conflicts of his Real and Ideal. Thus, this essay tries to show the change of reality in Yeats’ poems, which goes through a dialectical development, focusing on the relation between reality and imagination in his poetry.

A new movement, a desire for a new world, emerged all over Europe when the French Revolution broke out in 1789. In England which had suffered from structural contradictions, such as suppression of social system, political conservatism, and excessively rationalism, the intellectuals regarded this movement as the wave of freedom and hope, and expected impetuously a new world to come soon. With a response to this new spirit many writers had expressed their freedom and ideal in poems. Also, Shelley(1792-1822) participated actively in the wave of freedom. Especially, in “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” (1816) he describes very much a free and ideal world. In the poem, he describes his freedom and ideal as “intellectual beauty.” In the late 19th century, Ireland which had wanted ardently independence from England fell into political disorder. Yeats (1865-1939) wanted his country to become an ideal society, and so began to lead the Ireland’s Renaissance. He was influenced by Romanticism and Pre-Raphaelitism, and seemed to tend to describe an ideal land with such motifs as Irish myths, legends and symbols like rose, which represents his ideal land. Both Shelley and Yeats tried to describe their ideal world in their poems. In “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” Shelley describes his ideal world as the world filled with illusory lights of intellectual beauty, whereas Yeats describes his world as a world of “eternal beauty” in “To the Rose upon the Rood of Time”. Thus, in this paper, I intend to compare Shelley’s intellectual beauty with Yeats’s eternal beauty and the relationship of a poet to actuality and to God in their poems.