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.

Blake, Yeats, and Bishop wrote poetry about children from a child’s perspective, to make us take a closer look at our behaviors, thoughts, and society. Both Yeats’s “The Stolen Child” and Blake’s “The Chimney Sweeper” in Songs of Innocence juxtapose two different worlds, and the child in each poem is associated with the ideal world of our dream. For Blake, the other world as opposed to this world is characterized by perfection filled with love and compassion, which only God can create. Yeats’s “The Stolen Child,” on the other hand, is not characterized by good versus evil; the world we inhabit, though full of sufferings, has traces of beauty that God has given to humanity. Yeats makes us reminisce about our childhood when we were innocent, suggesting that the key to happiness in our daily lives can be found there. Bishop furthers the device of childhood reminiscence with an emphasis on human perceptions, making a psychological approach to her poems, “The First Death in Nova Scotia,” “Sestina,” and “Manners”; hence, the perspective of her child speaker is much more complicated so as to reveal human conditions. We have to find out what the actual world looks like in the poem by inferring what the child gives. Because the psychology of the child is not explained by anyone else in the poem, we place ourselves in child’s perspective and compare the experiences from an adult’s point of view. All the poems about children discussed in this paper are really about adults.