Any Irish writer can hardly liberate his mind sufficiently from the questions of public duty to form and influence the opinion in Irish politics. And for the same reason almost all the contemporary Northern Ireland poets are under the pressure to lead his readers through the psychic hinterland to emerge from the Northern Ireland crisis. But the demands made on Paul Muldoon result to his persistent belief that poetic language is an abstraction of everyday discourse. Muldoon claims and testifies that poet's word can be used to the particular function of expressing the poet's intention: the poet's task is to control the meaning of the words in relation to the other words in the poetic text. Thus his poetry is to some extent full of fantastic and disconnected languages which, he seems to argue, comprise the actual experiences in the contemporary Northern Ireland. In this perspective his poetic languages tend to be the fragments of the continuous narrative and have different tones and styles. And his early poems seem to the readers to shift between different levels of meaning which keeps the poet's attitude toward the material and the context of the work. In this process his poetry is to create his own poetic world as a paradise free from the violent and corrupted real world as well as to draw links between poetry and politics. That means that his early works repeatedly figure out the relation between social and poetic significances of poetry and at the same time investigate the nature of poet's word as a way to form his own world. This seesawing attitude to the responsibilities toward the contemporary Northern Ireland makes his poetry tend to be oblique by detaching the poet himself from the society.

Yeats began his career as a poet elaborating the Celtic legends and stories about the life and politics of the Irish people: Irishness was a source of his poetic inspiration. Later he moved to formulations that complicated his own attitudes toward his contemporary politics in Ireland and caused misunderstanding of his works among his readers. Because he emphasized violence embodied in the struggles of political conflicts and historical events. For Yeats, history steps to another stage with violence. In other words, he focused on the violent moment in historical events. In describing the process or movement of memorable event in history he distances himself and keeps his views or judgments on it with ambivalent words. He does not support for or oppose to the only one side in the political event, to show his interest in the significances of the moments. Thus he is far from the passionate politics in his contemporary Ireland. Rather he sees the violence as a power to change in history, as his poem "Leda and the Swan" shows. In the myth of Leda and Zeus he reads the destructive act of rape on Leda by Zeus within the frame of destruction of the nation-state. And Yeats focuses on Leda's tragic experience with powerful and violent Zeus as an event toward the violent and tragic history afterwards. In short, he shows the violence as one committed to change in the history of a state.

Yeats and Keats differently introduced their notions of time circulation and eternal life. One expressed limitations of human which could be overcome by art. And the other introduced time flowing in harmony and peace. And in one poem, we can see something lively such as young people, birds, trees, salmon-falls, and in the other poem we can find laziness and leisure. However, there is some similarity in that they introduce the subjects of circulation of life and eternal life. Yeats shows the passage of time by the Great Wheel or gyre which develops in the course of formation, fullness, decline. And Keats also presents the passage of time by using the phrases such as “swell the gourd,” “plum the hazel shell,” “warm day will never cease.” These symbolize swelling and continuance of time. So we can find the way how time is flowing in their poems. In Yeats's “Sailing to Byzantium,” time travels from a youth to an old age, and in “To Autumn,” time travels from summer to autumn. In this circulation Yeats's immortality can be reached by the media of art. And Keats gets it by the circulation of seasons. So one continues to voyage with eagerness for Byzantium in which he could find his everlasting life through the mosaic of 15th century, and the other comfortably waits for next seasons. Two poets respectively develop their poems in different ways, but they finally achieve the same subjects of ever-lasting life in the passage of time. In conclusion, Yeats pursued immortality by separating spirit from the body, because the flesh would be decayed. On the other hand, Keats thought that the immortality could be acquired by being one with time. Unlike Yeats's “Sailing to Byzantium”, Keats's “To Autumn” has a tendency to keep harmony and reconciliation, instead of confrontation. Therefore, autumn enjoys “sitting,” and “asleep” without haste.

William Butler Yeats was born at Georgeville, Sandymount Avenue, Dublin, in 1865, and died in the South of France, in January 28, 1939. Yeats was fifty in 1915-1916. He provides a poetic rendering of his visionary experience at his fiftieth year in the fourth section of "Vacillation" written in November 1931, when he became absorbed in the philosophical thinking while writing A Vision: "My fiftieth year had come and gone,/ I sat, a solitary man,/ In a crowded London shop,/ An open book and empty cup/ On the marble table-top./ While on the shop and street I gazed/ My body of a sudden blazed;/ And twenty minutes more or less/ It seemed, so great my happiness,/ That I was blessed and could bless."(CPN 251). In May 9, 1917, recalling his fiftieth year, Yeats describes this experience in a prose, entitled "Anima Mundi": "Perhaps I am sitting in some crowded restaurant, the open book beside me, or closed, my excitement having overbrimmed the page. I look at the strangers near as if I had known them all my life, and it seems strange that I cannot speak to them: everything fills me with affection, I have no longer any fears of any needs; I do not even remember that this happy mood must come to an end. It seems as if the vehicle had suddenly grown pure and far extended and so luminous that the images from Anima Mundi, embodied there and drunk with that sweetness, would, like a country drunkard who has thrown a wisp into his own thatch, burn up time." (Myth 364-5) Seamus Heaney was born in April 13, 1939 in Count Derry, Northern Ireland, and has been attacking Yeats since 1980s for the latter's aristocratic mysticism and spiritual matters. Heaney gave a lecture at Oxford University in 1990, entitled "Joy or Night: Last Things in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats and Philip Larkin." This lecture was given at the end of his own fiftieth year and simultaneously commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of Yeats's death. In this lecture, Heaney comes to open up "a sudden comprehension" to Yeats's vacillating visionary experience of the spirit in "The Cold Heaven": "The spirit's vulnerability, the mind's awe at the infinite spaces and its bewilderment at the implacable inquisition which they representall of this is simultaneously present" (The Redress of Poetry 148). In "Fostering," a poem from Seeing Things (1991), Heaney professes his poetic admission of Yeatsian visionary position: "Me waiting until I was nearly fifty/ To credit marvels" (50). In short, Heaney reaches what Yeats did for the spiritual world. The main objective of this paper is to demonstrate how Heaney reacts Yeats's poetry of vision. My focus is on the year fifty, when they erupt their creative energy in terms of "vacillation"which nevertheless shows the provocative and violent dynamism of the Yeatsian "interlocking gyres."

Yeats established a contact with the spoken word and learned to use it so that he could express the reality and acquire masculinity under the influence of his participation in Abbey Theatre. And he, dramatizing himself, would express the life of the individual person with long and objective points of view, of which he was to follow simple methods of dialogue and debate. In his some later poems, Yeats adopts these methods and suggests his subjects through some persona of ‘Self,’ ‘Soul,’ ‘Robartes,’ ‘dancer,’ ‘He’ and ‘She.’ His concerns in this form are not to direct confess of his mind or feeling but to give different voices and opinions on his poetic subject. Not as his early poetic voices which represent poet's own subjectivity, these persona have voices of various opinions and show some conflicts each other in the text so that the reader should refer to all their positions and would be led to his or her own conclusion on the debate. The other significance of the debate form in Yeats's poetry is the participation of women persona and her role as a speaker of Yeats's attitudes on his writing. Different from the other male modernists, Yeats adopts the voice of a woman, submits himself to the female perspective and distances himself from the poetic situations and the subjects intended to suggest in his works. In other words, Yeats seeks poetic impersonality by speaking in female persona. Yeats’s use of the dialogue and debate between the persona of different experiences and different gender reinforces his attempt to displace his early romantic faerly landers and respond to his urgent subjects-the real world matters. With this method he portrays himself as a being caught between his social identity and his permanent personality, which grants him an achievement of the deeper wisdom into the human life and personality.

It is generally accepted in Yeats criticism that Crazy Jane series poems in his Words for Music Perhaps are the poet’s Mad Songs originated from his obsession with sexual passion in his old age. And a number of critics have found Crazy Jane poems to be a work of heroic tragedy. But there is no tragedy for Crazy Jane, nor can she be tragic in herself. Even if she is a crazy old witch, cursing a moralizing Bishop, she can be seen as a poetic persona for Yeats to criticize his contemporary Ireland culture. As an ex-Senator of “sixty-year-old smiling public man” Yeats would not be at ease in criticizing on his country’s agonizing preoccupations with its “Irishness.” However, Yeats had a long career of attacking his contemporary Ireland. So for Yeats in Ireland’s 1920s and 30s self definition processes, it would be natural to publish his opposing views on the several censorship laws and general trends towards cultural exclusions in which the Catholic social teachings dominated the major discussions on sexual and gender questions, excluding the other secular arguments. Yeats had always been fascinated by the unity of the opposites. His Crazy Jane represents Yeats’s concept on unity-in metaphysical meaning and in cultural level as well- through her arguments on love and body. Crazy Jane suggests that the energy of bodily desire is essential element in life and it may be originated from the interplay of the dirty and the pure, the sacred and the secular, and then it can urge human being make the greatest effort to affirm the physical fullness of reality. His contemporary Ireland Catholicism, in his view, excludes the body and soul. So in individual and in nation as well, “nothing can be sole or whole that has not been rent” for Yeats.

W. B. Yeats and Thomas Hardy, as poets, were contemporaries. Their long careers spanned the transition from Romanticism to Modernism and their poetry constitute two of the most powerful dealings with that transition and those traditions. Younger poets after Yeats and Hardy have attested to their significant influences on their works respectively. Until 1930s it seems that the poets preferred Hardy as their poetic model, but after the 30s such a stand has become unpersuasive. Considering the course and interdependence of these two poets’ reputations and influences, we are led to acknowledge that Yeats and Hardy defined the options for poets for the whole period of the 20th century and that consequently poets have tended to be divided into two distinguishable streams. This paper aims to distinguish those different streams through the poetic works of Yeats and Hardy. There is some hint of determinism in both Yeats and Hardy, but with very important difference. In Yeats’s early poetry human weakness is implied despite a heavy-handed insistence on nature’s sympathetic; identification with man. But Hardy’s poetry implies a human strength in the face of a nature indifferent to man’s social arrangements and adjustments. Yeats proceeds dramatically to make a system, a private mythology; Hardy shows the structure of a mind capable of coming to a disturbing conclusion. Both Yeats and Hardy find nature for the most part unsympathetic to man, but while Yeats prefers to escape to a dreamy or fairy land or The Great Mind, Hardy illustrates man’s own resistance and adjustment within this world of reality. So, while Yeats offers a vision of a higher reality beyond or behind nature, Hardy, as a result of his acute scrutiny of appearances of the real world, offers us personal and narrative instances of man’s responses to the neutrality of nature. Hardy’s dealings with reality are for the most part moral, while those of Yeats’s incline to amorality, which means that Yeats allows himself to wander far from an acknowledgment of the limits of our individual lives and strengths. These different attitudes to reality lead to their poetic tone: Hardy’s-control of tone, Yeats’s being high and energetic. Considering the comparative characteristics of Yeats and Hardy we are led to conclude that they defined the options for the younger poets following after then: experimental and traditional, modernist and anti-modernist visionary, and discursive and rhetorical and plain.

This paper aims to explore the processes of poetic transformation of Ireland matter in W. B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney and compare the two poets’ characteristics of attitudes to Irish politics. Even though one does not have any idea of their poetic prepositions in their poetry, there can be some understanding of the relationship between each poet’s poetic material and his works of poem. Yeats and Heaney keep distances themselves from Ireland in their poetry as a man does to woman. Some critics’ attacks that the contamination of literary discourse by political statements points to the poetics of Yeats and Heaney, and those attacks are resulted from the notion of the identification of woman with the land, which are the characteristics of these two poets. To the tradition of romantic love poems Yeats admires the Ireland and its people and transforms them into a sort of mythology. That is to speak that love poems and patriotic poems are blended in Yeats. With this point of view one feels in reading Yeats’s poems the period after the Easter Uprising of 1916, like “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” or “Easter 1916” and “September 1913,” a terrible new beauty that changes the old political and moral landscape. He struggles to question the situations caused the bloody violences and sacrifices. With this questioning he mystifies the imagined or ideal community. The essential Yeatsian themes and attitudes sound through the earlier works of Heaney. He draws an analogy between the preserved bodies of human sacrifices in the peatbogs of Denmark and corpses on the streets of contemporary Northern Ireland. And He employs gender stereotypes and myths to describe the violent and depressive situations in Ireland in his poems. Sometimes he uses myths, whether of apocalypse or sacrifice. But he always takes a questioning stance toward the power of mythic signification. In “The Tollund Man” the speaker comprehends the transforming and eternalizing power of myth and he also recognizes that power as a ‘blasphemy’ because it averts his, and the reader’s, eyes away from the specific victims and from the horror of the individual violent act.With this focusing on the individual victims, Heaney gives voice to those victims who can no longer speak, not silencing their individual voices on favour of a single voice and eternalizing their mythic power.

In order to appreciate Yeatsian poetics it is important to consider the fact that Yeats poses his own self with masks, which are represented as his poetic persona in his poetry. It is also necessary to consider that the majority of traditional Yeatsian critics have different opinions about the differences between Yeats's early and later poetry. To a larger extent, Yeatsian criticism has argued that Yeats's early poetry diffuses some index of femininity -- ornament, detail, dreaming atmosphere, and so on and lacks reality, intellect, 'masculine,' and 'salt.' And many of the critics frequently condemn it as bad poetry on the basis of the argument that it is full of feminine profusion that obscures the reality. From the traditional viewpoints, however, his poetic persona give some insights into a certain way of appreciating his early poetry. First of all, Yeats's female persona in his early poetry belongs in the literary current at the end of the 19th century. In this perspective the persona and the characters in his works of this period have some common features in pursuit of an imaginary world, such as an uncivilized, primitive or mythic world. The pursuit of the imaginary world of male characters in Yeats's early poetry parallels the real and active female persona. Most of the female persona in Yeats's early poetry have consistent and real perspectives on their reality, and are firmly founded on their world. Nashina in The Island of Statues and Niamh in The Wandering of Oisin are very active and have firm purposes. By contrast, the male characters, such as Colin, Thernot, Almintor, and Oisin, hesitate for their love and are ‘enwound' inactively by their counter-characters. The other point to consider in order to appreciate Yeats's early poetry is his treatment of female beauty. Traditional love poems deal with female beauty as a thing that passes away like any other thing in this world, and in a threatening tone argue that it should be used at its prime times. In Yeats's love poems, however, female beauty is presented as a power to fascinate and urge men to act. The attitude of these female persona and characters in his early poetry develops and makes ‘Crazy Jane' character possible in his later poetry.

이 논문은 Yeats의 초기시 “To Ireland in Coming Times"를 분석 이해하는 것에 목적을 두고 있다. 분석의 방법으로 주제적 접근과 전기적 방법이 이용되어 이 시를 쓸 당시 Yeats의 정치적 활동과 접신술에의 경도, 그리고 Maud Gonne과의 만남 등을 배경으로 살펴보았다. 그리하여 이 작품에서 Yeats의 정치적 활동과 신비주의를 작품 속에서 접목시키고자 한 그의 시인으로서의 시도와 그의 사랑과 꿈이 이 작품 속에 용해되어 있음을 알게 되었다. 뿐만 아니라 더 나아가 이러한 주제적, 전기적 접근을 통해 이 작품은 Yeats 시세계의 하나의 출발로 이후 그의 시들에 변용 또는 변주되어 나타나는 주제와 이미지들이 저장되어 있음도 드러난다.