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.

Yeats and Murakami are writers who believe in spirits. They both treat them as if they are real. Yeats's Purgotory is a story of Father and Son, Father killing his own son to disrupt the cycle of Life that is tainted, whereas Kafka on the Shore is a story of Mother and Son, Mother causing all the tragedies in Kafka's father, sister, and himself. Kafka's mother is a person of Memory that stays constant, which is the origin of all the tragedies, and refuses to flow with time; and Son intervenes in her Fate, changing her and himself. The leitmotif of the novel is the Oedipus complex. In the meantime, Purgatory is a practice of Yeats's religious system of Life and humanity. In the play, the two kinds of people are illustrated by Father and Son; Father can see the invisible, ghosts, but Son cannot. The play is based on the conception of souls being born again and again in endless cycles. To disrupt it Father kills his own Son, as he had killed his own Father. It is beyond the moral of the world, killing his own son, following his own belief. Both works could be read as a metaphor of life. One relies on psychology, and the other relies on mythology. Murakami may have read Yeats, and Yeats might be interested in Murakami if he lived and read him. Murakami is in a position to deal with this kind of subtle subject in a subtle way, because he is a writer of the East well versed in the West. In the same way, Yeats was in a unique position, who was familiar with things eastern. Hence, their works manifest strong inclinations toward mysterious milieu, most prominently what is supernatural.

Yeats and Stein are both modernists. The one lived in Dublin; the other lived in Paris. Both revolutionized poetry and novel in their own way. Yeats’s poetry displays the highest degree of form that gives sense of time and space; he relies on tradition to achieve it, whereas Stein invents a totally new way of writing in order to make new sense in prose. This paper attempts to show how to read Yeats’s Meditations in Time of Civil War and Stein’s Tender Buttons. We see Yeats’s poems in it as well woven embroidery in spatial and temporal terms. The more you pay attention to form in his poetry, the more marvelous, sensuous feel of the poems’ texture you have. In the meantime, in different ways than Yeats, Stein’s prose flows like time smoothly, perfectly, like music; if you take time to think, the making of sense is broken; if you just let yourself feel the sensation that the flowing of words and sentences guide you, sense makes sense makes sense, in Stein’s idiom.

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.

The paper compares Yeats and Renoir. In his Autobiography, Yeats mentions Manet and Monet in passing, but by the time he received his Nobel Prize for literature, he has formed a clear idea of French impressionism and knows painters, such as Monet. Though Yeats has never touched on Renoir, he is very much like him, sharing the same poetics of art: the heavenly vision of the world, and puts it into practice in his works, such as “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” which is the main focus of my study in this paper. Then I try to establish a link with Renoir. Like Yeats, he regards art as an expression of heavenly vision, turning his landscapes into Heaven on earth; his nudes into a unionizing of nature and man. It is the poetics of Unity of Being in Yeats's term. Renoir in his later life suffers from severe physical pain, being wheelchair-bound because of his rheumatism. Despite his personal hardship, Renoir never wavers and aims to transform the worldly into the heavenly. His painting is, thus, a manifestation of his beautiful vision of the landscapes of the other world he will live in.

The paper searches and analyzes the image of Iseult Gonne in some of Yeats's poems. It is not difficult to locate Iseut's images in most of the poems that contain her image, except the poem, "Long-legged Fly." In this poem the young girl at puberty practicing a tinker shuffle picked up on a street is said to be Maud Gonne, as definitely noted by Jeffares. But this paper claims that she is Iseult Gonne on the basis of Yeats's recording what he has witnessed, the young girl barefoot dancing and singing, thinking that nobody is looking at the edge of the water and sand at Normandy. And one of the important poems that immortalizes Iseult is "To a Child Dancing in the Wind," singing what's permanent in the present Iseult, against the passing of life and time. This concern deeply permeates most of Yeats's Iseult poems, as one of them being "Two Years Later" and another is a poem, "Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad?" (written in 1936, three years before he died in 1939) in which the poet calls Iseult's husband a dunce, because Yeats loves and pities Iseult so much. To Yeats and in his poems, Iseult Gonne symbolizes eternal beauty or something that should remain for good. Not only that, but also the most beautiful and strongest of Iseult Gonne poems is "Owen Aherne and his Dancers" written immediately after Yeats's marriage to Georgie, with two sections, once the first being called "The Lover Speaks" and the second "The Heart Replies." As the image of dance indicates, it is about Iseult Gonne, with Yeats in disguise. It signals a new beginning for Yeats in relation to his poetry and to his life-long love Iseult.

The paper analyzes three artists by looking into their art works; Kim Hongdo and Picasso and Yeats. Kim is the greatest painter Korea has ever seen in history, and Picasso is the greatest painter of the last century, whereas Yeats is the 20th century greatest poet. What they have in common is the literati painting in them. The first two were painters, well versed in poetry. Kim did not create poems, but poems in pictorial images; the best paintings were created toward the end of his life, after a life-long effort to perfect his strokes in calligraphy. His three-pause execution of a stroke is the key to his perfection of his art. When it reaches the limit of perfection in art, its strokes resemble nothing in the world, an astounding feat in art. The effect the sum of strokes makes in a work of his is tantamount to the pure abstraction of soul in Yeats's supreme poetry, and to the pure abstraction, or the pure form of Picasso's painting. It is quite natural that the pure abstraction in Picasso evokes the most beautiful sentiment toward the whole humanity. Picasso's secret to his great art must be his literati temperament in art.

The paper defines two key terms of the last century: Deconstruction and Decreation. Emphasis is put on the second term, as it is useful to understand how Stevens composed his poetry and what he wanted to say about form and content in poetry in a modern context. In his essay "The Relations between Poetry and Painting" he talks about the term Decreation, which means the modern sensibility and mind that eye reality. Stevens' definition of decreation seems to fit well in some of Yeats's poems, the fact of which proves that it can be applied to modern poetry in general, as it has gone through the same soil and climate. Picasso exemplifies and consolidates the usefulness of the terms decreation and deconstruction. Stevens has made one term current and useful for deepening the understanding and appreciation of modern and contemporary poetry, and possibly modern and contemporary art.