예이츠의 세계관 및 시적 사상의 기조는 감정 즉 엄밀히 말해서 정서에서 발생된 상상을 통하여 천체 전우주의 영원불변의 세계를 이해하는 것이다. 따라서 각 개인은 이 불변체의 각 구성분자가 되면 시간, 공간 나아가서 인생 또는 세상의 모든 현상형체는 개인자체에서 출발한다는 논점에 귀결된다고 보는 것이다. 따라서 모든 성좌를 내포하고 있는 전 우주는 개인을 그 축으로 하여 움직이는 운동체로서 어디까지나 개인자체가 곧 우주의 전부 (The Whole)가 된다고 보았으니 예이츠는 이 전부인 동시에 이 전부를 움직이는 힘인 동시에 생명의 나무 (The Tree of Life)인 것이다. 따라서 예이츠는 자기 자신을 불사조라고 상상하기까지 되었고 마침내 주관주의 및 개인주의사상의 시인이라 널리 평가되고 있다. 예이츠의 문학적 생애는 작품의 성질과 특징에 따라 초기와 후기로 나뉘어진다. 즉 저작전집 (The Collected Works in Verse and Prose in Eight Volumes)이 출판된 1908년을 경계로 한 전후 2기다. 예이츠의 문학적 생애의 전기 (1887-1908)의 20년은 다양하고 화려한 활동기였으며 이때에 그는 많은 시, 극, 산문의 제작 및 교정서를 발간하여 영국문단에서 확고한 위치를 차지하였다. 예이츠의 작품은 전후 일관하여 볼 때 켈트종족의 과거에 집착하여 과거를 승화하는 환상 우수 및 초현세적 고독의 희열을 추구하는 도피사상이 고상한 어조로 표현되어 있음이 그 중요한 특징이라 볼 수 있다. 또한 예이츠의 켈트적 성품은 시대정신의 영향하에 그를 예술지상주의의 작가 및 국민문학의 지도자가 되게 하였으며 그는 신비사상을 심취하여 그의 예술의 기저를 삼았다. 그러나 그의 켈트적 민족성의 중흥을 성립하고 있는 것은 실로 뛰어난 감정이라 볼 수 있으며 아울러 예이츠의 신비사상이나 상징주의는 감정 및 감정에 기반을 둔 상상에서 기인되었다고 본다.

From the beginning of his career as a poet, William Butler Yeats made serious efforts to learn and master the complex and abstruse Indian religious-philosophical- artistic system and tried to learn Indian philosophy system which he could use in his poems and other works. But what he borrowed from his Indian sources depended upon what he liked at a particular phase of his career, and upon his own ideas of art during that phase. Whether he liked the ascetic aspects or the life-affirming aspects of Indian philosophy was decided by his temperament as well as his changing ideas of art. For example, in the early part of his life when he was so feeble and weak as to escape into unrealistic world, his interest in asceticism, contemplation and the search for truth was strengthened through his own reading and associating with Chatterji. In his middle phase of life, after meeting Tagore and reading his Gitanjali, he learned the Upanishadic idea of the self. In his later part of life when he affirmed and accepted life and this world as a natural condition, he met Shri Purohit Swami. Under the influence of Swami his ideas of art once again favored celebrating the supernatural, but simultaneously they were glorifying human passions. Sexuality and passion appeared to him aspects that could be sung about with intimacy. Instinct began to appear to him very sacred. He was turning to another phase of Indian philosophy which attributes sacredness to spontaneity. Yeats began to integrate the natural and the supernatural through his art so that his art becomes a new religion with spiritual overtones and with the warmth of the passions of life.

This study proposes to venture into the common elements and differences in both W.B. Yeats’s and Derek Walcott’s poems. It has been said that the young Walcott was sympathetic to the Irish writers, such as Synge, Pearce, Yeats, and Joyce, because he intended to make himself master of the themes and rhythms of the exile or castaway that the Irish writers echoed in their works. Of the Irish writers, Yeats was especially a poet who a little more previously wrote of the same issue as the young Walcott tried to and the young poet’s attention was deeply caught in the Yeatean poetics, more specifically, in the Yeatean mask which echoes a solitary self as an artist. Walcott’s Crusoe as a poetic self echoes the Yeatean mask. More specifically, it is a parallel for a poet with his daily ritual of the poet creating a new poem in the desperately isolated island. It is believed to be created by Walcott’s comparing himself and his own country to Yeats and Ireland in terms of an exile, a castaway or a lost self, which reflects a solitary and artistic figure in his poems, such as in “Crusoe’s Island” and “As John To Patmos”. Despite this fact, Walcott is also a poet who has built up the self-figure on a different base from Yeats’s heroic or aristocratic self. His poems are based on the Caribbean multi-racial background characteristic of slavery, poverty, lost hope, and lost identity that have resulted from the colonial policy of the British government that stepped into the Spanish and the French shoes. His Caribbean figure is a poverty-stricken, obedient, but patient, willful castaway, with his thick lips tightly closed. Although Walcott is a poet who has developed his own poetic self on the Yeatean base, which resulted in his fruitful poems, it is believed that he made greater efforts to weave the Caribbean spirit into poems than others. Then, the Caribbean tropical landscapes, such as sea, wood, and sun, etc. are a poetic space which sublimated his themes into the Caribbean soul.

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.

Every artist tries to attempt to search for ‘self’ through his own medium. It is the same with a writer, especially a poet. W.B.Yeats, a poet and poetic dramatist, had also tried to achieve ‘Unity of Being’ through his poems and poetic dramas. But in the case of Yeats, the development process of his ideas and theories is said to have played an important part in his search for self, that is, Unity of Being. The purpose of this paper is to examine and define the search for self through the development process of his ideas and thoeries. Yeats's dissatisfaction with science, materialism and empiricism led him to join the Dublin Hermetic Society in 1886 in which he acquired “the doctrine of reincarnation”, “the theory of correspondences,” and the idea that “all existences are arranged cyclically” from Madame Blavatsky, the leader of the Society. Turning against the Society's asceticism and Blavatsky's dogmas, Yeats took part in the so-called “the Order of Golden Dawn” led by MacGregor Mathers. Yeats was initiated into Mathers' Kabbalism, European Rosicrucianism. So he came to believe that there exists the symbolic system in the process of human soul. He also studied William Blake and was interested in Blake's ideas of “the four Zoas” and “the four-fold vision.” He developed Blake's ideas into his own theory of “Quarternity” as well as into his idea of four Faculties (Will, Mask, Craetive Mind, and Body of Fate). In 1925, he compiled the ideas and theories which he learned from various sources into a systematic organization in A Vision, in which he described his vision chiefly in terms of the idea of the “Great Wheel”. Yeats's vision of cyclical progress of human soul revealed in the idea of the “Great Wheel” is thus not only the ground of his understanding of human life and national history but a part of his search for self, his Unity of Being.