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.

The purpose of this research is to study the Yeat's view on the good and evil in human nature. Throughout his life, Yeats has made a spiritual, mystical and mythological world in which he tries to portray the eternally dichotomized nature of human consciousness. Yet, he attempts to harmonize the antinomies, the contraries that highlight human nature. Yeats's life and art is full of such attempts to unify harmoniously opposite forces: body and soul, good and evil, light and darkness, the sun and the moon, the antithetical and the primary, etc.. In this almost impossible unison of conflicting forces, Yeats hopes to find the unity of the two. For Yeats, instinct without spirituality, intellect without emotion, wisdom without action, and good without evil can only express a part of human nature, and he refused to deny one side of human being. He did not want to separates his soul from matter, good from evil but to find the perfect balance and attain the assertion of the 'Unity of Being.'

This article explores Yeats's “A Woman Young and Old.” All the poems in the series “A Woman Young and Old" were written between 1926 and 1929. During this time Yeats was lamenting the vulgarity of hegemonic Irish culture. This series poems described feminine sexuality in the social and cultural repression of women. The sequence of eleven poems deal with the problems of female body and desire in a repressive society. In these poems Yeats insisted on the beauty or importance of feminine sexuality and sexual desire. “A Woman Young and Old” takes up Yeats's metaphysical questions - eternal beauty, the relationship between body and soul, the interdependence of sexual love and spiritual hate. Feminine sexuality is the mark of the rebellion against conventional social and cultural frame. Yeats's female personae embody a sacred sexuality and Yeats's sexual frankness close to a sexual mysticism. Feminine sexuality and desiring female bodies are defiantly asserted, and asserted specifically as transgressions, because they are precisely what is forbidden. In this series poems the female body and desire is expressed in Yeats's criticism of the repressive sexual morality and culture of the Irish society, especially the Catholic Church. Linking of feminine sexuality and the sacred indicates Yeats's critique of Catholic Irishness. The speakers of the female sequence are embattled with a social and symbolic order that seeks to confine them. Yeats described sexual freedom and defiance against the authority and opposition in patriarchal society. Yeats's increasingly explicit emphasis on feminine sexuality and sexual desire at that time. Whereas Irish Catholicism viewed the desires of the body as threats to the soul, for Yeats the two were interdependent. Yeats insisted that “the love of man and woman, and inseparable physical desire, are sacred”(UPII, 451). This article tries to show how Yeats's of awareness of feminine sexuality is linked with a sexual mysticism and the sacred. Yeats connected women's body and desire with a sexual mysticism and the sacred in such a bold and defiant way.

The first issue of The Yeats Journal of Korea published in 1991, just after the foundation of the Yeats Society of Korea on the same year. The society published the 25th volume of the journal on June 30, 2006. At first the journal was issued annually but since the year 1998, it has been published biannually. The aim of this paper is to check the citation of domestic material at the theses in the journal from the first issue to the 25th issue. As I imagines, it turns out that very few scholars seem to read the theses written by other Korean scholars. Only small number of theses among 234 theses acknowledge that they cite theses written by other scholar and published in this journal or other journal. Just a little more than the theses which acknowledge the citation of other scholars' theses acknowledge the citation of other author's books. Though some theses in The Yeats Journal of Korea acknowledge the citation of other scholars' theses and/or books, the number is very small. Compared with the long history and large volume of Yeats study in Korea, there should be more citation of domestic material. When we scholars read other scholars's theses and books, and cite them, if possible, The Yeats Journal of Korea will have the significance to exist. No citation can be interpreted as the scholars' confession that the theses were of no value. The way to develop Yeats study in Korea is to read the theses and books published in Korea as well as published in foreign counties.

This paper is focused on the rather esoteric search wondering if the two masters of letters across the recent West would communicate with each other in that they commonly lived in marginal countries, were schooled in English-speaking cultures and interested in the ultimate and overwhelming themes on 'maximalism' that mainly tends to put value on life and death, eternity and transcendence. This moment that the sublime mission of critics practices concreteness of obscurity recurs to us. Yeats tries to represent the motives stemming from myths and legends, while Borges pursues the representation of fantastic states missing in library, labyrinth and maze, which means their sympathetic embodiment of 'bricolage' on permanence. And through doubt of inertia realized in use of language and creation of works, Yeats practices 'automatic writing' and 'theory of mask' for the objectification of his works which results in construction of reality, while Borges does 'self-reflexivity' which shows us deconstruction of reality as broken mirror in favor of sarcastic criticism of writing. For the political positions of their biographies, the masters have something in common with their prominent careers and activities in which Yeats served the senate and resisted the British empire and Borges contributed to professor of a state-run university and stood against the Peron regime. Henceforth, some conjunctional and disjunctional points on intertextuality between the two masters can be inferred from their views on Buddhism and poems. In the respect that we, who can't be creators of texts but their agents, only drive violent 'assemblage' of code to camouflage Things, the suggestion that the immortal poem of Sowol's, "Azalea," imitated "He wishes for the cloths of heaven" and "The Lover Mourns for the Loss of Love" of Yeats's is reasonable and natural, and it can be deduced that Sowol didn't duplicate Yeats's poems but borrowed masochistic imagery from them, which reminds us of T. S. Eliot's declaration that only the first rank poet unnoticeably can steal other poets' works. On the other hand, Borges, through the parodized "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," shows us the meanings of the text changeable with transitions of generations. Accordingly Sowol's poems tacitly responds to Yeats's poems, while Borges straightforwardly transcribes the original work in view of self-reflexivity. That Yeats's response to Shen-hsiu's and Hui-neng's Zen poems indicates that Zen can free people from the abstract mode of life fettering them is in contrast with Borges's reaction to Buddhism that 'a parable of arrow' and the high monk, Bodhidharma's insight de-constructing his pupil's faith of self-verification searching for his authentic mind only leads to meaningless groping of life. Although the masters's views seem different, virtually they are equal in the sense that life is nothing but some limited play in mood of 'tragic joy,' which is just like recognition of nothingness. Even if the entire works of Yeats's and Borges's can't be read, we can sense their themes converged under keynote of 'maximalism.' For pursuit of a Utopia, Yeats yearns for it, but Borges denies it. In recognition of reality and fantasy, Yeats tries to overcome reality through fantasy, while Borges thinks of reality as fantasy. Their positions on woman are extremely different in that Yeats exposes masochistic symptom, while Borges manifests 'carpe diem' mourning a beauty's fate finally encroached by the beast of time. For the ultimate theme of God, Yeats longs for unity with God, instead, Borges views God 'langue' as cultural and linguistic structure. Concerning cataclysm of civilization, the masters are of the same opinions in that Yeats asserts cyclic patterns of civilization to move from the one pole to the other pole and Borges songs a Nietzschean circulation. They show us considerably wide contrasts concerning recognition of eternity since Yeats yearns for immortal existence, while Borges views human beings ephemeral existences. In conclusion, intertextuality functioning an essential principle of life becomes the ground to deconstruct the boundary between authors and readers and shatters the absolute icons of authors and canons, since the moment we unfold texts before us, we often tend to indulge into illusion reading precisely them rather than 'misreading' them and recognizing reality caused by automaticity of linguistic structure. However, to avoid or lessen the contradiction or irony in the reading community, we can enjoy the horizon of split or inter-subjective meanings produced by diverse walks of readers with eradicating 'transcendental signified' of canon. After all, Intertextuality can be the background of De-construction, simultaneously serves the ideology of 'pragmatic theory' for texts not to be the origins or totalities of Things but to contribute to this and that aim of life.

Republic of Ireland is called a 'saint's country' since more than 90% of population believe in Catholicism. The Irish Catholicism had a great influence on the Irish society and culture by offering the hierarchical order to Irish people's way of life. And also, Catholicism had been a symbol of nationalism and played the role to confirm a sense of national identity. It is also true that since Free State Ireland, Catholicism with the word 'Gaelic' has contributed to making the national identity or 'racy Irish atmosphere'. However, the Irish Church of the 20th century was dedicated neither to spirituality nor the intellectual enhancement of the faith, but to material and social advantage. At the first stage of his writing, Yeats tries to consider Irish Catholicism as holy, combining it with mysticism of theosophy. And also he uses it to strengthen nationalism. However, Catholicism of that time, unlike what Yeats thought, sticks to the practical line, which makes Yeats criticize its materialistic ends. Meanwhile, talking about Heaney, although he accepts its values of contributing to the communal union and he himself is a serious devotee to pilgrimage going to Lough Derg or Station Ireland. Heaney feels at ease because of Catholic's fanaticism and oppression imposed on individuals. The final conclusion of this paper is that although these two poets, Yeats and Heaney, accept that Irish Catholicism has contributed to inspiration of the national patriotism and promoted the modernization of independent Ireland, they criticizes that Irish Catholicism is lacking its artistic spirituality and that it is a trap from which artists are to escape.

Soul of the World (or Anima Mundi) is the key to our grasp of Yeats as a writer in the Hermetic tradition and that it underlies his whole sense of artistic tradition, I affirm that the right to primacy in any consideration of Yeats's major concept belongs to Anima Mundi. Through his vital, lifelong rapport with this Great Mind and Memory, Yeats communed with universal tradition. His desire to make the rapport a group effort, dependent upon collaborators, reinforced the notions of community and unity in multiplicity. Yeats believed that reality is discovered in the soul. For him, the Great Soul was a wellspring of imaginative art, a means by which Nature herself became intelligible. In this study, Yeats's theory of the World Soul, addressing occult, metaphysical, and literary antecedents of his belief, especially the way of his building of concept of "Anima Mundi" in his early life and experiences are surveyed. Yeats has a very keen interest in mysterious strange things in his early life, and he meets many influential friends who could help him build his theory of the World Soul in Dublin and London.

This article explores Yeats's “A Man Young and Old”. This series poems described conflict between a man and a woman. According to Yeats's theory of the art, people are in a perpetual conflict of opposites. Opposition determines the cycle pattern of life and ensures recursive waves of love and hate as men and women struggle toward personal collective Unity of Being. Such conflict evokes differences between person and daimon, and also between men and women. These parallel conditions suggest an analogy: man relates to his daimon as to a woman. Later, Yeats conceives the daimon not only as a woman bur as a gendered being in her own right. Gender provides a crucial key to Yeats's art, because gender is imprinted upon all temporal and spiritual reality. It is employed not only as a subject in his poetry, but as the means of fleshing out his philosophy and clothing his personal experience in a universal and comprehensible metaphor. Gender determines the way Yeats's views reality. In “A Man Young and Old”, Yeats describes a type of personality that is consummately objective-primary-solar-masculine according to his vision of archetypal phases. Although that personality is consistent throughout the sequence, there are stages of experience and insight that shift from youth through maturity to old age, as the title signifies. This personality attempts to make sense of his life through the gendered relationships that are at once the source of his lost innocence and the anchors of experience from which he gleans hard-earned insight. If there is one word that characterizes the man's perspective, it is adversarial.

Yeats uses aesthetic beauty as a way of presenting his major theme from “The Song of the Happy Shepherd” to “Under Ben Bulben.” However, he changes his point of views from 3rd person’s objective view to 1st person's subjective one to strengthen spiritual mystery of beautiful aestheticism. After all, poetic aestheticism is spiritual and personal beyond materialistic and superficial description. Although most his aesthetic vision comes from nature, nature is beyond human codes. Yeats’s “The Wild Swans at Coole” deals with his spiritual aestheticism through interaction of nature and human spirituality in that the poem integrates two opposing and antithetical elements into “mysterious, beautiful” being. Yeats’s spiritual aestheticism revitalizes the significance of his poetic vision which unites divinity and humanity through integration of human beauty and divine beauty in “Leda and the Swan.” Yeats also integrates history and vision together to recreate poetic aestheticism in that both serve to activate dynamic fusion through aesthetical interaction.In his early poems, Yeats utilizes unusual integration of nature and human life. Then, he moves into hierarchical antithesis of natural and spiritual beings. Sometimes, he uses reality and imagination to strengthen his spiritual aestheticism. Also, Yeats explores possibility of the fusion with aesthetic art and sensual life, humanity and divinity. Therefore, in his early poems Yeats frequently uses aesthetic description as a destination of human life by using definite nouns, but in his later poems he rather uses adjective more to strengthen human life as a process of journey. In conclusion, Yeats deliberately reinforces the significance of his spiritual aestheticism through dynamic and organic interaction of multidimensional views, nature, myths, faiths, and human codes.

This study is on Irish Fairies in Fairy and Folk Tales in Ireland with a foreword by Kathleen Raine edited by Yeats for Korean readers. Nowadays many Korean editions about celtic culture were published after 2000. Fairy and Folk Tales in Ireland is the first American edition by Colin Smythe Limited in 1973. This volume contains Fairy and Folk Tales of Irish Peasantry, first published in 1888, and Irish Fairy Tales, first published in 1892. In this volume Yeats divided Irish Fairies into two great classes: the sociable and solitary and described the characteristics of each fairies, and then collected 8 fairy poems and 16 stories. Every poem and story in this volume is very interesting to me. Yeats is the best selector. The sociable fairies who go about in troops, and quarrel, and make love, much as men and women do, are divided into land fairies and water faires or Merrows(mermaid, merman). The solitary fairies who are nearly all gloomy and terrible in some way. However there are some among them who have light hearts and brave attire. There are the Lepracaun, the Cluricaun, the Far Darrig, the Pooka, the Dullahan, the Banshee. In Irish folk-lore Yeats had come across these fairies many others undiscovered.He had thanks to Patrick Kennedy, Miss Maclintock, Lady Wilde, Mr. Douglas Hyde. Mr. Allingham, Fergusson, and Miss O'Leary. He quoted from their works. His role is a vital linker in a chain of truly apostolic transmission of traditional lore. Evans-Wentz dedicated his first remarkable anthropological work, The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries(1911) to Yeats and G. Russell(A.E). According to Kathleen Raine, Yeats's own interest in the "Matter of Faerie" was two fold. In part, certainly, it was a literary admiration for the highly formalized art of story-telling, and perhaps for the Irish use of the English language, those idiomatic turns of phase which arise from translation, by Gaelic-speakers, from one language to the other. Yeats who believed in Fairy-Faith to perpetuated in popular form mysterious taught by the Druids see, like A. E and Evans-Wentz, in Tir-na-N'Og, the land of the Sidhe, Ploto's and Plotinus' "yonder" when our souls descend and where they return. They also thought the Fairy-Faith belong to a doctrine of souls. In the Irish fairy poems and stories there are great beliefs in fairies. But Irish people remember the word, 'Be careful, and do not seek too much about fairies.'

Recalling images from the past is one of Yeats's favorite poetic activities, especially in his old age. Many of his later poems are created on the basis of this technique, providing considerable information on his contemporary characters, events and other factors. In a sense, this kind of versification appears to mythify prominent historic figures in turbulent modern Irish history. In the poem "Municipal Gallery Revisited", Yeats sees his poetic personae as 'permanent or impermanent images', but ironically, they will be remembered permanently because of this work. They will also illuminate individual and national history dealt with in the poetic stanzas. Yeats's creative strategy is to enumerate a series of intense scenes that are worth remembering. To grasp a specific image in a particular moment is intended to reveal an absolute feature of a given character or a historical as well as cultural event. Through their own images, these people depicted in the poem are turned into symbolic characters. Greatness is impressed with a single scene and genuine perpetuity is uncovered with an instant reflection. In other words, a briefly described image is not just a section randomly isolated from a particular person's life. Rather, the image implicitly sums up and typically project an individual's complex personality in the poem, and in turn, on the reader's mind. The poet-narrator walks through the gallery, appreciating the portraits and other paintings on display and opens up his own creative world. Political characters in the beginning, then Hugh Lane and other Gregory people as a cultural stepping stone and finally the portraits of John Synge and Lady Gregory appear in sequence through the poetic work. Such a climactic approach stresses what the poet has in his own mind. Artistic ideals and literary colleagues who shared them with the poet are remembered and in the end, he himself go beyond the grave and sees his own self as an image already dead in an elegiac imagination. What he wants to record in a literary epitaph is gradually expressed along the long gallery of the museum. Eventually, the scenes composing this verse create a visionary gallery to light up the poet's real self.

Recalling images from the past is one of Yeats's favorite poetic activities, especially in his old age. Many of his later poems are created on the basis of this technique, providing considerable information on his contemporary characters, events and other factors. In a sense, this kind of versification appears to mythify prominent historic figures in turbulent modern Irish history. In the poem "Municipal Gallery Revisited", Yeats sees his poetic personae as 'permanent or impermanent images', but ironically, they will be remembered permanently because of this work. They will also illuminate individual and national history dealt with in the poetic stanzas. Yeats's creative strategy is to enumerate a series of intense scenes that are worth remembering. To grasp a specific image in a particular moment is intended to reveal an absolute feature of a given character or a historical as well as cultural event. Through their own images, these people depicted in the poem are turned into symbolic characters. Greatness is impressed with a single scene and genuine perpetuity is uncovered with an instant reflection. In other words, a briefly described image is not just a section randomly isolated from a particular person's life. Rather, the image implicitly sums up and typically project an individual's complex personality in the poem, and in turn, on the reader's mind. The poet-narrator walks through the gallery, appreciating the portraits and other paintings on display and opens up his own creative world. Political characters in the beginning, then Hugh Lane and other Gregory people as a cultural stepping stone and finally the portraits of John Synge and Lady Gregory appear in sequence through the poetic work. Such a climactic approach stresses what the poet has in his own mind. Artistic ideals and literary colleagues who shared them with the poet are remembered and in the end, he himself go beyond the grave and sees his own self as an image already dead in an elegiac imagination. What he wants to record in a literary epitaph is gradually expressed along the long gallery of the museum. Eventually, the scenes composing this verse create a visionary gallery to light up the poet's real self.

In connection with the world beyond globalization, new theories such as Samuel Huntington's 'The Clash of Civilization', Gilbert Achcar's 'New World Disorder' and 'The Third World War' are emerging. This paper was motivated by the personal thinking that the Republic of Ireland as Celtic Tiger goes beyond globalization toward 'uisneach', as the hidden tradition, and that Yeats is a great guide to illuminate the quest and that Heaney is an inheritor or an achiever of the quest.This paper begins with the hypothesis that the modern Irish poetry is seeking their hidden tradition, 'uisneach'. I think that to understand the modern Irish poetry, we should first understand what is meant by 'uisneach'. 'Uisneach' has the various meanings: in the geographical sense, it means the area of the "territorially elusive" fifth province of Mide, the navel or the center of Ireland; in the religious sense, it means the sacred center of Ireland in pagan times; in the mythological sense, it is related to the Ulster Cycle including "Oidheadh Chloinne Uisneach", the fate of the Sons of Usnech, known as the Deirdri Ballads; and in the aesthetical sense, it means the origin where creative energy is flowing. W.B. Yeats was a knight in charge of the quest of the Irish political independence through the Celtic Revival against Anglo-Saxon's scientific modernity. His search for 'uisneach' reflects the resistance on the regional as well as the European level against Anglo-saxon's culture. Seamus Heaney's poetry is also going toward the fifth spiritual space where the Irish people believe a reconciliation is to be made, by taking some steps. And lastly, he also goes beyond the global space toward their hidden world based upon Celtic belief and the mild liberalist aestheticism. My last conclusion is that 'uisneach', a hidden tradition or vision means the Celtic vision modern Irish writers have sought. I think that Yeats is a poetic predictor or mentor to illuminate another waste land, Ireland, by suggesting the vision while Heaney is an inheritor in that he goes toward the hidden tradition Yeats suggested.

Although Yeats declares himself as "the last romantics," it is highly controversial to situate him in the romantic tradition inaugurated by Coleridge's and Wordsworth's theories of the imagination. It is my argument that whereas the romantics often takes the natural landscape as referential and as a means for visionary ends, Yeats makes use of the same landscape to bring divine voices into existence. Among the great romantics I take Coleridge for my argument, since like Yeats he directs his endeavors to the supernatural. In Coleridge's "The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem," the narrator attempts to articulate the experience of nature in an unmediated form, without projection of one's desire onto nature. He attempts to vision of the harmonious correspondence to nature first in "gentle Maid" and then his baby. The question remains open, however, whether a perceived harmony expressed in the poem is also limited and confined by the fragmentary view of the narrator himself. In "Frost at Midnight" the narrator finds himself cut away from the outside world. As an answer to his emptiness he projects onto his son the harmonious state in which the outer world corresponds to the inner world of the child's feelings. The narrator's dependence upon a futuristic vision leaves the question of whether the vision is an expression of an epiphany of the truth perceived or merely a projection of his desire to escape his being disconnected from the outer world onto his son. Vacillation between perception and imagination, which often occupies Coleridge's poetics, suffers much shift in Yeats who with much hesitation turns his attention away from complex dialectic between mind and nature or from choosing one over the other. A part of The Wandering of Oisin shows us well that the image of the shell there is only a mirror for a dream which is no longer that of the shell but the subjective dream of the poet's imagination. To the extent that the shell is a thing in nature, however, the image remains in essence natural, But Yeats already attempts to escape the danger ingrained in the fusion of the perceived object and the perceiving consciousness into one as early as in 1990. In "The Symbolism of Poetry," Yeats makes it clear that his symbol is not simply to evoke its inexhaustible traditional meanings but an intangible reality of the divine essence. Yeats intends to write divine voices into existence and to rediscover the long-unity between man and the gods. Yeats's poetics will be allegorical because the meaning of the symbol is revealed by a key and this key is given as the divine order itself. But it may be realistic in order to make certain that the symbols will be easily recognized and read. This is explicit when Yeats openly tells us that a natural object in a landscape is also to be read symbolically as in "Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931" where Yeats makes the divine symbol fit neatly within the picture of the concrete scene as well as in the network of the symbol. His main purpose for the natural landscape here is to constitute the divine symbols and gain their deeper structural unity and most of their intellectual content by writing divine voice into existence, by recording the signals that reach him from a divine realm.

This is a paper that shows how poetic dialogue plays upon poems between three different authors, William Butler Yeats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. Many of Yeats' poems broach a gentle issue of how they respond to their poetic precursors. "Among School Children" can be read as an updated version of a Romantic "conversation" poem. Coleridge applied the term "conversational poem" to "The Nightingale," one of twenty-tree poems in Lyrical Ballads of 1798. Earlier than this, a phrase Sermoni propriora ("suitable for conversation") appears in his "Reflections, On Having Left a Place of Retirement." These two poems demonstrate Coleridge's conscious efforts at experimenting with conversational speech as a legitimate poetic language. Coleridge's conversational mode is in full bloom in such remarkable poems as "The Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" and "Frost at Midnight," the latter a masterful lyric that paves ways for Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" in its compositional mode and structure. The traffic between the two Romantic authors and "Among School Children" is obvious--a noticeable parallelism is developed in terms of diction, figures, thematic structure, and rhetorical devices. Yeats's "Among School Children" serves as a poetic testimony to the on-going lyrical dialogue that explores possible links between the workings of different poetic minds and that creates remarkable echoing effects.

This paper attempts to analyze and prove Yeats' gradual acceptance of the middle class and the people's democracy of South Ireland, just liberated from England. He always struggled against the Irish Catholic bourgeoisie and their practical and political nationalism during his lifetime for realizing his ideal vision of Ireland embodying the “Unity of Being”; he dreamed to establish a culturally aristocratic nation keeping order not by forced law and power but by imagination and desire of self-transcendence, while South Ireland pursued practical interests and became a theocracy. After burning his “rage and lust” against the mass culture of post-colonial Catholic Ireland, Yeats began to admit Catholic Ireland as it was with the perspective of the poetic transcendence, “tragic joy.” His recognition of the Catholic middle class at the end of his life is considered for attaining the sense of unity with Irish people, which was essential to his vision of nation. This paper traces his changing attitudes toward the middle class, especially focusing on such poems as “The Municipal Gallery Revisited,” “The Statues,” “Circus Animal's Desertion,” and “Cuchulain Comforted.”

The Two Kings, based on the myths of Edain in the ancient pagan Ireland, is Yeats’s long autobiographical narrative poem. This poem expresses not only the poet’s private love story but also his deep concern in the national affairs with realistic consciousness of responsibility. Therefore, in spite of its mysteriousness it shows that Yeats has traveled far into the actual world since his earlier narrative poems. In this poem Yeats adopted only the main part of the original story and changed its plot and reversed its ending on purpose. He reconstructed the original story and recreated it as a “universal” private mythos through imaginative embellishment and creative modification. Furthermore, by clothing each mythical character with multi-roles and -symbols, he succeeded in making the poem a piece of work with both individuality and universality. Through the symbolical behaviors of the characters, Yeats states his firm conviction that a man’s life should be determined by his own free will, and that the lovers’ happiness should dwell in their earthly life, not in their union after death. And the poet asserts that nothing is more important than the reliance and morality between human beings for our true life and happy love. In addition, the poet contends that a leader of a nation must deliver his subjects from their chronic oppression and poverty.

"Man can embody truth but he cannot know it," said Yeats a few days before his death. And this truth is embodied in the two “death poems,” "Under Ben Bulben" and "The Black Tower". How is that truth embodied? And what is its content? A close reading of the two poems gives some sort of significant answer to that question. The truth Yeats tried to embody may be "Unity of Being", the poet's eternal pursuit. Throughout his long poetic career, wearing various masks, and in various ways, Yeats sought to accomplish its poetic embodiment. To solve multi-levelled divisions of being, Yeats sought persistently to "remake" and "renew" himself, his self as an archetype of the Irish people. "Under Ben Bulben" and "The Black Tower" suggest the poet's dream as returning to and restoring the heroic Celticism and integrating it into making Ireland. In "Under Ben Bulben", drawing on the Celtic heroes' wisdom and strength, the poet asserts his philosophy of reincarnation and man's profane perfection, and, also, the greatness of artists' creative power. After presenting his selected history of the great artists, the poet asks the Irish poets to succeed to his poetic dream. And, then, he casts cold eyes on life, on death, renewing himself as one of the heroes of his dream. In "The Black Tower", the poet's inner drama upon the threshold of death, the tower, his old symbol, reveals itself as a microcosm of Ireland that the poet wishes to defend against his enemies by death. In this poem, the poet does not give up his dream to the final, even if the dark and gloomy mood is dominant. Finally, for the tower's defense, the poet commits "an epic suicide", to become a legendary Irish hero himself. Thus, the poet embodies the truth he has found.

The purpose of this study is to research the relation between Yeats's imagination and the theme of old age, death, and after-life in Yeat's poetry. According to Heraclitus, cosmology is formed aspects of polarity, assuming 'living each other's death, dying each other's life.' The world is conceived as opposition and contradiction, and the human is dual in nature. this dualistic conflict of consciousness has become a basic starting point of his imagination. Yeats recognized the dualistic conflict was an energy of a creative mind and a characteristic of human nature. It brought about the struggle between inner world and outer world. This struggle begins with assuming an individual's anti-self opposed to his primary self. To him, the conflict or struggle, endowed with the meaning of human being existence, is the seed of being of unity. "An Acre of Grass," dealing with the theme of old age, Yeats saw the tragic reality as positive. In spite of decrepitude and quiescence, Yeats said 'Grant me an old man's frenzy, / myself must I remake.' In Yeats's case, great are art is not merely created out of the conjunction of the artist's mind and external world, but rather out of the artist's denial of his primary self and recreation of his mask, the true image of his antithetical self and a fragment of the Anima Mundi. In recreating this fragment he actually creates a higher order of reality than the visible world possesses. Yeats conceive death and life are not divided but connected in "Tower", and "Mohini Chatterjee" as accepting positively human tragic condition. Yeats said that the wheel or cone of the Faculties may be considered to complete its movement between birth and death, that of the Principles to include the period between lives as well in A Vision. In "Byzantium", Yeats deals with the after-life in the view of Four Principles as seeing the soul after death as living reality. To Yeats, the phenomenon of violence, hatred or passion in this world is prerequisite to reincarnation, a creation of other self or true self. After getting rebirth, Yeats tried to reach profane perfection. Looking out over the whole of human life, and its prevailing desolation, he tried to find the proper response to life and suffering in terms of gaiety. Yeats's final response to the old age and death here is no longer the horror, but he accepts the old age and death as the pain of human being with tragic joy through his unique imagination.