William Blake, regarded as one of the great Romantic poets, was a prolific painter, printer, and engraver as well. Yet, he did not receive due credit for his work during his time. For a long time, his graphic art and literature were treated in isolation from each other; literary critics focused only on his poems and art historians on his engravings or paintings. Recently, attempts to see his work, particularly his illuminated books, as a “composite art” or as a synthesis of word and image have increased. I will also consider his work as a kind of open text in a poststructuralists’ notion, which blurs the boundaries between them and encourages readings as textual performance. In this paper, I will first show how Blake differentiated himself from other painters, engravers, and publishers by devising his own way of creating and printing illuminated books. Next, focusing on his earlier work, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, I will briefly discuss the characteristics of his illustration and the content of his poems. Finally, I demonstrate how Songs makes for unique reading in which the reader is an ongoing participant in its textuality, crossing between words and words, and words and images. The advent of the Industrial Revolution brought with it an increase in mass publication, and the distinction between fine art and designs or craftsmanship was yet to be clarified. Against such distinction, Blake created a unique method of "relief-etching", through which he combined text and engraved illustration on a single copper plate and hand-colored the prints. Each copy thus remains a unique work of art. His illuminated books envision interdisciplinary and multimedia text and question the modern system of classification and hierarchies between poem and painting, painting and engraving, art and literature. In the images of Songs, we see Blake’s profound interest in Gothic art as “divine” work. For example, he persisted in using firm outlines that were characteristic of Gothic art. Like other Romantic poets, Blake believed the imagination and God’s spirit to be manifest in outline rather than color. The letter was regarded to be appealing to the sensuality of the eyes. On the other hand, the poems in Songs reflect the dialectical relationship and synthesis in which “innocence” might be wedded to “experience,” as its subtitle Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Souls implies. Songs is, however, not to be read by isolating the poems from the illustrations. In the introduction of Songs of Innocence, Blake proposed the intricate and conflicting relationship between speech, writing, and painting. The title page also suggests that children are not merely passive learners imitating the nurse’s reading but active readers-seers who may better understand Blake’s illuminated books. Further, this paper, after the examination of a few poems, attempts to show that the images do not necessarily illustrate the poems and can rather create a link between different parts of the text. This rejects the traditional critical hierarchy of word over image. Blake’s work indeed opens up an infinite vortex, that is, the textuality, as Roland Barthes or other post-structuralists might call it, and invites us to participate as active readers.

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.

I have made an attempt to read the tower imagery in some of Yeats’s middle and last poems. The tower is a key symbol in his poetry. He purchased a Norman tower in 1917 and moved into it to live in summers from 1919. Since then, it had become an emblem of his profound philosophy in his philosophical poetry. I read both the tower poems and their social and historical backgrounds to understand his works more deeply. I also study the way his tower poems reflect Neoplatonic symbolism and intellectual symbolism. The tower symbolizes the poet's spiritual and historical changes in his life; at one time, the tower was a romantic and stable place for the newlywed Yeatses; at others, it served as a retreat at his critical moments and as a place for philosophical contemplation on life and death; eventually it became the poet himself and the eternal symbol of his art as well.

Yeats and Blake consistently used rhetorical counter-questions whenever they expressed spiritual ambivalence of human existence throughout their poetry. Although Yeats was influenced by Blake, he explored different subject matters to express diverse ambivalence. While Yeats focused on ambivalent fusion of spiritual and physical conflicts, Blake focused on ambivalent integration of theological, social, and moral conflicts. Yeats used rhetorical counter-questions to express the ambivalent unseen reality in "The Second Coming," "Among School Children," "Leda and Swan," and "Meditations in Time of Civil War." "Beast" in "The Second Coming," "dancer" in "Among School Children," Helen in "Leda and Swan," and "dream" in "Towards Break of Day" connote fusion images of opposing objects to evoke many aspects of one thing by using rhetorical counter-question. Also, Blake used rhetorical counter-questions to express the ambivalent spiritual, social, and ethical reality in "Tyger" and "A Little Boy Lost." Especially, Blake qualified spiritual ambivalence through various images of fire in "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" in that fire includes associated meanings of heaven and hell. Most of Blake's spiritual poems often begins with a rhetorical counter-question and ends with a rhetorical counter-question to strengthen the significance of ambivalent archetypal cycle. Although both poets differ from each other on human spiritual value, they used rhetorical counter-questions to free from religious, political, moral, social, and traditional repression in their poetry. In this sense, men are making meanings through their mystic imagination which is free from religion and tradition rather than scientific reason. Therefore, Yeats and Blake used rhetorical counter-questions to qualify open aspects of human imagination and to complete archetypal counter cycle.

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.

In this thesis I discussed feministic attitudes in the works of three writers: William Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion, William Butler Yeats’ A Woman Young and Old, and Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching(道德經). Blake and Yeats were English visionary poets and Lao Tzu was an Old Master who lived in the 2nd century B.C. in Han Dynasty China. In Visions of the Daughters of Albion Blake is not only concerned with the rights of women but also with the slavery systems and freedom. The heroine is called ‘soft soul of America.’ Blake knew the first radical feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and may be responding to her enthusiasm for the emancipation of women. Moreover, the oppression of Oothoon is bound up with the campaign of the early 1790s against both the slave trade and the nearer cruelties in the exploitation of child labour. The heroine Oothoon is raped by Bromion and abandoned by her lover, Theotormon. Theotormon’s jealousy binds them, back to back in a cave. Bromion’s violence and Theotomon’s jealousy and oppression cause her woe. She is trying to justify the innocence of love, the joy in the making of love and delight in life, the beautiful in every life. Her long outburst against hypocrisy in marriage and restraint in love in the third section of the poem is for women repressed by men in traditional and Christian society. She wants to be a human, not a servant of man. In A Woman Young and Old the woman speaks first in youth, then in age. This series of poems are companion poems to those of A Man Young and Old. These poetic sequences have an identical structure of eleven poems, ending with a section from Yeats’ translation of the Oedipus cycle. The first poem, “Father and Child” opens with an image of a young woman leaving the conventional world and the judgment of other people for an attractive life and her own opinions. In the sixth poem in the central position, “Chosen” the woman takes for her theme the theme of the poem. The young woman compares the peace and feeling of completeness after lovemaking to the perfect moment when the “Zodiac is changed into a sphere,” the Thirteenth Cycle or Thirteenth Cone in A Vision. It is that cycle which may deliver us from the twelve cycles of time and space. In the last poem, “From the ‘Antigone’” the old woman, now a tragic heroine, narrates her descent “into the loveless dust.” The heroine in A Woman Young and Old tries to find her own voice and life. In the first chapter of Tao Te Ching the nameless Tao is the origin of heaven and earth which grows the myriad things. Thus these two are the same. Upon appearing, they are named differently. Their sameness is the mystery, mystery within mystery. Heaven is the symbol of man; earth is the symbol of woman. Man and woman have the same root, and their union makes the myriad things. In the sixth chapter of the book Lao Tzu praises feminity, called ‘the valley spirit,’ the root of heaven and earth. The valley is used metaphorically as a symbol of ‘emptiness’ or ‘vacancy;’ ‘the spirit of the valley’ is something invisible, yet almost personal, belonging to the Tao. ‘The female mystery’ is the name of chapter 1, or the Tao which is ‘the Mother of all things.’ All living beings have a father and a mother. Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching could be translated as The Law (or Canon) of Virtue and its Way. He thought that all straining, all striving is not only vain but counterproductive. One should endeavor to do nothing (wu-wei). It means not to do anything literally, but to discern and follow the natural forces-to flow with events and not to pit oneself against the natural order of things. In this way Taoist philosophy reached out to council rulers and advised them how to govern their domains. Blake and Yeats insist women’s human rights and the union of man and woman can give us the perfect moment in this life. Lao Tzu teaches us feministic Tao and the harmony of man and woman. The three share great wisdom about the order of the nature and can elucidate the way of Feminism.

This paper is not primarily about Blake’s influence upon Yeats, though it is concerned about the question of influence and tries to suggest what influence Blake has upon Yeats. Rather, its main concern is about how Yeats wages “Mental Fight” with Blake, his “master,” in order to define himself. Indeed, the figure of Blake stands like a pair of bookends around the literary career of Yeats. But Yeats’s relationship with Blake was a constant warefare between a poetic odd couple. In fact, Yeats’s whole career might be compared to beating on a wall, which Blake managed to pass through like a ghost. According to Yeats, Blake failed to eliminate himself properly from his poems. Because he was “a man without a mask,” he could not efface his own presence from his work. In other words, he could not become an impersonal medium for the voices out of the spiritual world. To outwit Blake and, in effect, to stake out his own spiritual territory, Yeats rejects not only Blake but also, in a sense, that part of himself which he has created in the mythic image of Blake. As the result of it he can subvert Blake. Now for Yeats, a “master” is not someone he emulates. Or he does not embody the way one has hoped to embody the voice of the Immortal Blake; rather, a “master” was his opposite or contrary, someone against whom he struggles to define himself. Even after “The Symbolism of Poetry” Yeats was not prepared to look like Blake, “a man without a mask.”