예이츠의 초기 시에 재현된 탈식민주의의 다양한 면을 제시하고자 한다. 그는 아일랜드의 독립을 성취하는 효과적인 수단의 일환으로 ‘문화민족주의’에 깊이 관여한다. 하지만 그는 기존의 강경한 민족주의자들과는 달리 정치에 직접 참여하기보다는 문화·예술을 중시하면서 그들과의 관계는 원만하지 못하면서, 식민주의자와 피식민지인 간에 발생하는 양가적이고 경계적인 양상을 드러낸다. 초기 인도시편을 비롯한 여러 시에서, 예이츠가 주저하고 불안해하고 모순적이고 엉거주춤하는 태도로 미루어보면, 그의 양가성, 혼종성, 경계성이 시 작품에 재현되고 있음을 확인할 수 있다.

이 논문은 예이츠부부가 결혼 초기에 실시했던 자동기술의 상당부분이 매우 개인적이며 성적인 내용으로 이루어져 있는 점에 주목하면서, 그러한 성적인 내용들이 자동기술에 어떻게 표현되어 있으며, 그것들은 자동기술에 표현되어 있는 철학적이고 종교적인 내용들과 어떤 관련성을 갖고 있는가, 또한 자동기술이 『비전』으로 엮어지는 과정에서 그러한 사적이고 성적인 내용들이 감추어지게 된 이유는 무엇이며, 그것들은 예이츠의 삶과 시에 어떤 영향을 주게 되는가에 대해 살피고 있다.

예이츠의 후기 작품은 니체의 아폴로와 디오니소스의 이중성이라는 관점에서 볼 때 보다 더 정확하게 이해될 수 있다. 아폴로의 가상은 개인의 삶을 창조하는 힘인데 이러한 생각은 예이츠의 마스크 개념에서 가장 잘 표현된다. 지속적으로 개인의 가상을 새롭게 창조하기 위해서는 아폴로적인 것은 가상을 산산이 부수는 디오니소스적인 힘이 필요하다. 디오니소스적이고 아폴로적인 비극의 개념은 예이츠의 비극적 삶과 예술에 대한 태도를 관통하는 주제이며 특히 “비극적 환희”에서 가장 강력하게 반영된다.

예이츠의 시세계, 특히 초기시에는 낭만주의와 상징주의가 자리잡고 있으며 그 중심에는 ‘자연’이 자리해 있다. 예이츠에게 있어 자연은 ‘자연에 대한 동경과 모사’와 ‘자연과의 대립 및 의식의 우위’, 즉 자연 친화적 세계와 자연부정의 세계라는 진폭 안에서 인식되었으며 그의 시는 이를 형상화하거나 극복하려는 긴장의 궤적을 보이고 있다고 할 수 있다. 이 글에서는 이같은 예이츠의 자연에 대한 인식과 시세계를 한 축으로 놓고 한국 근대시에 나타난 자연을 살펴보고자 한다. 이를 위해 한국근대시의 완성에 가장 큰 역할을 한 대표적인 시인인 정지용의 시세계에 나타난 자연을 먼저 검토하였다. 그리고 현재 왕성히 활동하고 있는 시인들의 시세계에 나타나 자연을 각각 고찰하였다.

예이츠 철학의 핵심 사상이라고 말할 수 있는 아니마 문디는 추상적인 개념이 아니라 이 세상과 우리 인간을 움직이는 실체의 힘을 의미한다. 많은 학자들에 의해 시적 감수성의 비유로만 파악이 되었던 아니마 문디는 이제 예이츠 시와 예술의 핵심요소가 되었다. 이 글에서는 아니마 문디, 혹은 세계령의 기본이 현세와 과거를 연결해 주는 요정과 귀신이 출몰하는 지역에 있는 지역령이라고 주장한다.

최근 문학 담론으로써의 탈식민주의 이론은 실천적 의미에서 텍스트 해석의 전략에 중요한 영향력을 행사하고 있다. 더불어 탈식민주의는 식민 경험을 했던 국가 안에서 문화적 맥락으로써 식민 담론을 전복한다는 의미에서도 중요한 의의를 가진다. 작가에게 이러한 의식은 글쓰기에서 탈식민 공간과 주체적 정체성을 형성하게 만들어 주는 동기를 제공한다. 이러한 측면에서 본 논문은 정전적 글읽기로 대변되었던 예이츠의 텍스트를 탈식민주의 전략 중의 하나인 탈정전적 글 읽기로 다시 조명해보기로 한다.

This article discusses a consistent blend of autobiographical retrospection, metaphysical speculations, the passion of an old man raging against the approaching night. Many of these are similar to those in his earlier works, but art cannot be enlivened until it is kept in touch with “the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart” as in “The Circus Animals’ Desertion.” In “High Talk,” Yeats resorts to the determination of the artist in a degenerate world. Using a circus metaphor, he demands the artist put on high stilts so he may catch the eye of the audience. He needs the stilts, now being incapable of the brilliant fantasy of past youth. The poet is Malachi Stilt-Jack, the maker of metaphors in art, but the walker upon stilts, though an eye-catching figure, is an absurd posturing creature in his “timber-toes.” The image of “its rag and bone” in “An Acre of Grass” is connected to the image of “old bones, old rags” in “The Circus Animals’ Desertion.” It is a recurrent theme of old age in Last Poems. Much of what has been noble and great is gone; what remains is raging of the flesh. Only memories of the past remain to the old man, physically exhausted. “An Acre of Grass” looks back on the major poetic themes in Yeats’s later life.

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.

In this study, I will focus on “Byzantium” and explore how the poem mirrors the essence of Zen Meditation. Not only is the poem patterned after the progressive procedure of Zen meditation, but they also reflect the fundamental concerns of Zen meditation, such as the problem of duality, the concept of time, and an aspiration for freedom from the limitation of this life. These features of Zen meditation are expressed through the use of specific symbols, the implications of setting, and various poetic techniques. The purpose of this study is to provide another way to read the poem by analyzing it in the context of Zen meditation. The structures of the poem are loosely patterned after a typical process of meditation through which the meditator reaches Unity of Being. The process of Zen meditation is nicely depicted in the ten pictures titled “The Boy and the Ox,” each of which shows the gradual development of the meditator’s search for his won nature or Buddhahood. For the convenience of my discussion, I will simplify the ten stages of Zen meditation to four−confusion, immersion, union and return−which, I believe, cover all the important procedures in the meditation. The first stanza of “Byzantium” exhibits some typical features related to its meditative scheme, in which we can feel the sense of confusion on the part of the meditator or poetic persona. In other words, the meditator sets out his meditative journey to search for an answer for his sense of confusion or clear it. The second to the fourth stanzas are equivalent to the second stage (immersion) and the third stage (union or seeing the vision) of meditation. The last stanza parallels the final stage of Zen meditation (return). In “Byzantium,” we see the reflection of Zen meditation. The structural patterns of the meditative poems generally correspond to the four stages of Zen meditation: confusion, immersion, union or seeing the vision of the unity, and return. Yeats’ use of poetic techniques such as line scheme, use of number symbolism, and the arrangement of stanzas are closely associated with the meditative scheme of the poems. In addition, the major concern of the poems is reminiscent of that of Zen meditation in that they confront the problem of duality, which sets up the occasion for meditation. The agony of duality results from the concept of time. Thus, the meditator tries to reconcile the dichotomous elements, resulting in the state of freedom from time. More than anything else, the purpose of Yeats’ meditative poem lies in the poet’s aspiration for self-awakening, as in Zen meditation. The poem is Yeats’ record of his life-long efforts to meet his “fourth self” or Great Self.

The purpose of this study is to trace Yeats’s efforts toward an ultimate reconciliation of the contrary forces of human experience as they are reflected in his later poetry written Beyond Byzantium, and to explore the relationship between existential awareness and artistic vitality. Though Yeats reached Byzantium in 1927, from The Wanderings of Oisin to “Byzantium” he yearned for stasis and release, and thus sought the solace to be found in never-never lands ranging from the woods of Arcady and Tir-nan-Oge to the golden boughs of Byzantium. Yet a disquieted romantic and an unaccommodated man, he returned to the living world of unfinished men and the dross of their mortal pain. The world of the “dying generations,” for all its corruption and impermanence, is the place where Yeats, after much sailing, finally dropped anchor. Yeats ran his course between the extremities implicit in “Perfection of the life, or of the work,” and by the end of his career he took his stand with the claims of his art and the passions that make it possible. “Tragic Gaiety,” the hero’s rising above evil fortune and circumstance, is at once the matrix and the pinnacle of his final, transforming vision, and Yeats’s most significant legacy to our “tired” and “hysterical” age. Thus Yeats’s great achievement lies in his exposition of the artist’s will to transcend phenomenal limitations, and in the symbolic identification of creator and created. “Bitter and Gay,” the dominant notes of most of the poetry of Yeats’s last years, lay the tragic scene beyond Byzantium, and it was there that he finally reached a reconciliation with “Time.” Not transcendence, however, but the simple triumph of trying to be a total man was Yeats’s final accomplishment. After all the anguish and the judgements, at the close of his life he repented nothing, and could cry “Rejoice” because it is only through the despair born of tragedy that we can achieve true gaiety and unity in empathy with humanity. That was the joyful voice of a man who knew how to create out of destruction. This wholeness of vision which Yeats finally attained is the prime concern of this study.

This article surveys the correlation between Yeats’s translation of the two Oedipus plays of Sophocles, Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus, and Yeats’s own plays so that the development of Yeats as dramatist may be explored. In the first place, this article examines why Yeats had the long-standing interest in staging Sophocles’ tragedy. The reasons are explained in relation to Yeats’s tragic tendency and political purpose. Then the long and complex process of completing Yeats’s Oedipus project is pursued mainly on the basis of Clark and McGuire’s W. B. Yeats: The Writing of “Sophocles’ King Oedipus” (1989). In particular, this article concentrates on the time when Yeats decided to write his own version of Oedipus and the reason why the project had a long dormant period before it restarted and finally was completed in 1927. In the final place, the effects the Oedipus project had upon Yeats’s own plays are studied through a comparative analysis between Yeats’s translation of the two Oedipus plays and his other plays. On Baile’s Strand (1904) and The Herne’s Egg (1938) are treated to figure out the similarities between Oedipus and Yeats’s heroes such as Cuchulain and Congal. In addition, The Resurrection (1931) and Purgatory (1939) are dealt with to reveal the mysterious death of the old Oedipus at Colonus and the new perspective of death and old age it offers to Yeats. In conclusion, this article claims the Oedipus project made significant influence upon Yeats as playwright, so that the result pervaded nearly the whole plays of Yeats.

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.

This study is an attempt to analyze Yeats’s early poetry in the light of his theory of the mask. For this purpose the writer of the present study has first proposed to define the ‘mask’ to investigate the theory and has reached the conclusion that the ‘mask’ is a Yeatsian term for an ideal image of life which is always opposite to the natural self or the natural world, and the theory of the mask has three aspects−aesthetic, moral, and philosophical−according to the role of the mask. The aesthetic meaning of the theory demonstrates Yeats’s argument on the nature, the source, and the touchstone of a work of art: art is the embodiment of the writer’s mask of life and his inner struggle between mask and life sets him to his creative work; the quality of a work depends upon the expression of this tragic war. And all the more important, Yeats’s strong belief in polarity of the two terms of conflict is clarified. The study of Yeats’s early poetry in terms of his theory of the mask has concluded that Yeats’s early mask is the very transcendent realm which Yeats’s early symbolism proposes to evoke and the main symbols used to express this ideal world are the images of Arcadian island across the sea, rose, the Irish mythic world and Maud Gonne; and the synthesis of Yeats's theory of the mask and symbolism in his early poetry causes some distortions in both his theory of the mask and symbolism. The nature of his transcendent world is conveyed not by the symbols but by the imperfect realities in spite of his strong belief that “divine essence” can only be evoked by the symbols; the nature of this ideal world has also been distorted: it is not the super reality lying beyond reality like Mallarme’s but only an ideal place where all the impurities and imperfections of the real world are removed or corrected. As for the theory of the mask, polarity, the most important basis of the theory, has been impaired: only the value and the love of the ideal world is emphasized, whereas those of the earthly life are restrained or its weaknesses and painfulness are stated to describe the ideal world.

Yeats invents his own system of metaphors in the poem “Leda and the Swan.” The system urges Yeats to drive his poetry on unknown fields. Rather than following in the well worn tracks of Greek mythology, he tries to idealize a form of poetry that looks brief, yet carefully formed and worded: a metapoetic strategy by using related vocabulary at which he seems to excel. In the first stanza, he claims that Zeus visits Leda as a form of Swan and vividly draws in passionate language a picture of sexual intercourse by his sudden blow on Leda sleeping peacefully. His action looks like a rape on the surface, yet possibly interpreted in a different way, that is adultery between a god and a married woman; yet it thus turns out to be a historical moment worldly and spiritually at the moment of making love. Such words symbolizing as metaphors the relations of Lead and Swan in mythic stories are carefully crafted and allusively materialized to form a metapoetic allegory: a poetry that uses a system of related metaphors, violence and sex, to reflect implicitly on history in poetry and on its poetic program. Whether or not Yeats invents this metapoetic strategy, his poetic symbolism is strongly characteristic of his own connection to Greek symbolism as in mythic stories. Such a metapoetic approach as found in the poem can help us understand much about his own values on humanity, including why Yeats chooses to rewrite about such images, ideas, and poetic patterns as shown in Greek stories, and why−as in his discussion of violence and love put together in physical and spiritual beauty−he puts into question mythic literature and its literary criticism of love and battle just in the poem imitating Greek tales.

As Maud Gonne had been regarded as one of the most important factors in Yeats’s life and literature, this study aims to analyze her images reflected in the poet’s poems which were published in 1910s and 1920s. Maud Gonne is presented as a political icon of that time in Ireland in Yeats’s poems. Unlike his early poems, where Maud Gonne is idealized as a goddess, a heroic figure of unbounded nobility and courage, Yeats presents her as a tragic warrior who devotes herself to political activities for violence and destruction in this period. At the same time, Yeats shows his holding back of approving Gonne’s political role of female warrior. The number of poems related to Maud Gonne also is decreased when Yeats realizes that Maud Gonne devoted herself too much on the political matters.

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.

Mysticism was Yeats's lifelong concern and became the center of his work. He believed that mysticism can explain the truth of death, rebirth, the cycle of the universe. By founding his playwriting principles on mysticism, he revived Druidic belief, which had been formed mostly from Irish legends, lore, Celtic mysteries, his reading on Druidism ever since early childhood in Sligo. Yeats thought that a poet must be a mystic and that symbolism is the mystic's aptitude. To treat mystical themes, he needed to make things remote from reality by using symbols, but because of symbolic and mystical content some critics insist he founded his drama based on Noh plays. Even though he thought Noh is an ideal form of drama, it does not mean his drama is an extension of Noh plays. Symbols and the supernatural content were his solid principles long before he saw Noh plays. Furthermore, the similar themes in both Noh plays and Yeats's are something he had already learned from Celtic mysticism. The Shadowy Waters is an extremely mysterious story showing visionary experiences of Druidic otherworldliness. In this play, Forgael is following certain birds which are the souls of the dead in search of love. The ghost lovers in The Dreaming of the Bones have been dreaming of fulfilling their love since they died seven hundred years ago, but they can not achieve their dream because of the sin committed during life. This connotes something about Yeats's belief in purgation. He believed the dead have to live anew until the purgation is finished. He shows the same belief in Purgatory, where the dead can not free themselves from purgation due to the consequences of transgressions. In all of the three plays Yeats demonstrates Druidic doctrine that the dead exist and dream in the eternal cycle of birth.

The postmodernizing of Yeats had been a risky and tricky enterprise. As Naomi Schor in "Introduction" in Flaubert and Postmodernism (1984) points out, postmodernism in all its multiple manifestations is a moment "in" and "of" modernism. Daniel O'Hara, Paul A Bove, Geoffrey Hartman, Paul de Man, and J. Hillis Miller attempt such projects. Nevertheless, with very few exceptions, Yeats has been used by theorists mainly in examples within a longer theoretical argument, and very few works of book-length criticism have been studied. After that, I have been working since 1991 on postmodernizing Yeats from the perspective of Nietzschean postmodernism of genealogy which ranges from Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, and Lyotard, and from this critical standpoint I have been relating modernism with postmodernism in an intriguing doubleness so that rhetoric would be the anchor from which doubling strategies of postmodernism have been revealing and disrevealing. Yeats's poetry and poetics reveal such aspects of both modernism and postmodernism, just like his symbol or emblem of gyres, although the nature of postmodernism turns out to be extensive post-isms. However, my contention in the paper is that the Yeatsian transnational poetics in terms of the "transdiscursive position" of the Other will provide the lenses for rereading the modern and contemporary poetic texts as well as the topographical fluid intermappings of the poetic globe. By taking William Butler Yeats's poetics and poetry as an initiating analysis, the untranslability across the East/West divide will be left open by the space of the Other which "is something strange to me, although it is at the heart of me." The center of the subject is outside, therefore, ex-centric in the discourse of the Other. I would argue that the locus for this untranslability to be crossed over in terms of the “in-between” or “intersticies” is represented by cross-cultural/transcultural or transnational poetries in English. When translating from one language to another linguistically or culturally, there are often multiple meanings for a particular word, sentences, a poem, or a series of poems, the meanings which have been blocked in the contact zone or border zone of transnationalism to be transgressed, transmigrated, transported, and translated. Louise Bennet's poetry is one example of this transnational poetry.