There are two contradictory voices in W. B. Yeats concerning Irish nationalism. One is for support of Irish nationalism against the English colonial reign and its accompanying heroic sacrifices for the cause of Ireland. The other one is criticism against excessive demands for sacrifices for the sake of independence of Ireland. Instead of putting the first voice ahead of the second one, Yeats tries to record the two voices at the same time: the voice of justification of sacrifices for nationalism and the voice warning danger in nationalism as a commentary on nationalism. These ambivalent attitudes toward nationalism cannot be understood just as his uncertainties and ambivalent stance he took on Irish politics and his lack of understanding of reality. Rather, Yeats could be said as a faithful recorder of the inner territories of experiences of individuals in everyday life and reality under colonial reign and its countermovement of nationalism. He does not ignore the intimate and latent feelings of individuals (on the side of "body") heard through the loud exclamations of nationalistic causes (on the side of "spirit"). Yeats can be said as a postcolonial poet in so far as he supports Irish nationalism but with a hint of anti-nationalistic attitudes, he also raises questions about danger in postcolonial politics. He cannot be called just a crude propagandist of Irish nationalism. Rather by taking balanced attitudes toward nationalism and excessive sacrifices of individuals through nationalistic causes, Yeats suggests that nationalism could be an ideology and gives a warning sign that postcolonial politics should not forget its dark side.

The last century saw three great poets: Yeats, Eliot, and Stevens. They each had created new poems different from the previous ones. The current topic finds Eliot most discordant from the other two, who has started from Romantic poetics. By "Romantic" I mean that the poet grew out of Romantic poetics and/or is Romantic temperamentally. In Eliot's case, because of his stance on Romanticism and his educational background, unfortunately, both poets and scholars have been blinded to the fact that Eliot is deeply Romantic, stylistically and temperamentally. Read any portion of any poem by Eliot; it is there in the very poem, such as "Prufrock." It indeed is a good poem, witty and modern. But the drawback with Eliot is he is exclusive, thus the poetic range is limited. Compared with him, Stevens is a pure Romantic, who profoundly succeeds in renewing Romantic poetics in modern times, as evidenced in "Sunday Morning." Which is the counterpoint to Milton's "Paradise Lost." Of course, in terms of poetic gestures. Yeats is, compared with Eliot and Stevens, unique. He is against science, and goes back to myths and folklore and man. His "Long-legged Fly" is the epitome of his great poetics, a victory over the materialistic society of last century. Still, it is hard to understand how he could go over what seems to have been an impossible barrier, with such an outmoded thing, as mysticism, mythology, Romanticism, that all thought dead.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the value of W. B. Yeats’s penultimate play, Purgatory. It is a one-act verse play. There are only two characters: An Old Man and A Boy. Its story is simple. The Old Man tells his son (A Boy) of his family’s past: the mésalliance of his mother and his father’s squandering of everything she had, which he considers pollution to his family and declares as a capital offence. The Old Man kills his son with the knife he used to kill his father to stop the pollution from passing on to the next generation, and to stop the ‘Dreaming Back’ process for his mother. Purgatory is as much a play about the end of a historical cycle as it is a personal story. The obvious decline of the old man’s family fortune is an image of a ruined Ireland, its vigour spent and its thought forced in upon its own past. The qualities that have caused Purgatory to be one of Yeats’s most admired plays is the condensation and compression of his material, coupled with a lucid and immediately accessible realistic plot. The characters, actions and images are both natural and symbolic, moving and meaningful. The real strength of Purgatory lies in its unobtrusive poetic quality, the harmony of realistic subject matter and symbolist design within a lyrical composition of undoubted concentration and power. In Purgatory, more than anything else, Yeats solved the problem of speech in verse drama, which is one of his contributions to modern drama. Instead of contrasting voice patterns, he unified the action with a freely varied verse form in iambic tetrameters which is admirably suited to the terse, sharp idiom of modern speech. The most remarkable feature of this very natural verse form is its ability to reflect emotional intensification as the rising dramatic action moves through contrast and reversal to its inevitable climax.

Yeats held a life-long interest in Japanese culture, and employed the images, knowledge and inspiration he gained from Japan in many of his literary works. On the whole, it was the Japanese literary form that was most significant in his development as a writer. It was through the translations of Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa that Yeats became acquainted with Noh, the medieval Japanese drama. It is generally agreed that Yeats’s encounter with Noh marked a turning point in his career as a dramatist. The Noh led him to create “a form of drama, distinguished, indirect and symbolic...an aristocratic form.” In “Note to At the Hawk’s Well,” Yeats writes: I have found my first model—and in literature, if we would not be parvenus, we must have a model—in the ‘Noh’ stage of aristocratic Japan. From this statement, we can see how significant the Noh-form was to Yeats in his development as a playwright. When Yeats was first introduced to Noh, he immediately perceived affinities with Irish legends and beliefs. The Noh was not something completely new or alien to Yeats. It was the discovery of an ideal, an ideal form for him to express his perennial themes of the tension between the physical and spiritual worlds. Yeats’s Noh-inspired plays are often categorized as “dance plays” and we can see that “dance” was an important symbol which Yeats developed through his experience with Noh. Yeats wrote in his “Introduction” to Certain Noble Plays of Japan that it was a Japanese dancer, Ito Michio, who inspired him to write his new play, At the Hawk’s Well (1916). In Noh, the dance which is usually danced by a supernatural figure, is placed at the centre. Here, the supernatural dominates the stage and the action develops toward a moment of enlightenment. Yeats precisely points out this fact and writes that in his new play, instead of “the players working themselves into a violence of passion...the music, beauty of form and voice all come to climax in pantomimic dance.” However, since Yeats intended Cuchulain as the central figure of At the Hawk’s Well, the theatrical effect of the dance had to differ from that of Noh. Another characteristic of this play is that it dramatizes the ‘transformation’ of the Guardian of the Well, the role which Ito Michio played, through spirit possession. This change in personality is conveyed by means of a change in costume(she throws off her cloak to reveal a dress suggesting a hawk). This is a method resembling ‘monogi(物着),’ one of the most important dramatic conventions of Noh. Yeats explores this device again, in The Only Jealousy of Emer(1919), another dance play modeled on Noh, but this time using different masks to show the change in personality. Yeats’s interest in this motif of spirit possession eventually led him to write The Words Upon the Window-Pane(1930), a play where he dramatizes a seancē. Here, the dramatic tension is concentrated mainly on a supernatural manifestation through the ‘protagonist’ who is a professional spiritual medium. In this paper, I have discussed Yeats’s relationship with Noh through a detailed analysis of At the Hawk’s Well. In this play, we can see many aspects of Noh. The simplified stage, the musicians, the mask, the dance, the use of a square blue cloth to represent a well; these are characteristics reminiscent of Noh. However, we must note that this play was not merely an imitation of Noh but a completely new form of creative writing. Richard Taylor indicates the influence of Yoro, a felicitous Waki-noh, or God Play on this play. A comparison of these two plays reveal that Yeats had no intention of following the Noh paradigms faithfully. However, the inspiration he gained from Noh opened a wide range of dramatic experiments enabling him to write a sequence of dance plays. In later plays such as The Words Upon the Window-Pane and Purgatory, Yeats succeeded in achieving a dramatic effect closer to that of Noh.

In recent years, many of literary works in English has been produced from the so-called Third World. The notion of "contemporary poetry, however, remains strikingly provincial in the anglophone Western World. Also, even though the conceptions of American poetry have expanded to include minority writers of the Third World, the story of the glottalization of English poetry remains largely untold. Why is postcolonial poetry so much less visible in modern literary world? The term postcolonial has often been criticized for erasing cultural and historical differences, so it can be useful in highlighting similarities and differences among various cultures still grappling with their colonial histories. Yeats has been placed in many literary and hermetic societies. For the constituencies of Yeats studies, the claiming Yeats as postcolonial can help renew attention to a poet who, often charged with antifeminism and reactionary politics, has been losing ground to postmodernism, antiformalism, and ethnic writing. Yeats's postcolonization can strengthen the claim of Irish studies to be a player in the vibrant field of postcolonial studies. If we define the Easter Rising is the crucial moment, "Easter, 1916" would qualify as postcolonial. If postcoloniality is construed not as after decolonialization but as since colonization, then Yeats is more easily swept whole into the postcolonial canon, but so would be all kinds of Irish literature since the early 20th century, perhaps stretching the term postcolonial beyond use. So, we can have difficulties in defining Yeats as a postcolonial poet.

This paper is an attempt to discuss Yeats' meditative poem and its formative process. Before taking up the main subject, I will survey the background of the meditative poem. The most notable of meditative practices were the Ignation meditations that synthesized several medieval branches of meditation and gave them new echo in the early modern world. These meditation then formed the structural backbone of poems that also demanded a similar type of ordered contemplation by Donne, Herbert, Hopkins and Wordsworth. Also Yeats clearly fits into this English meditative tradition due to the Irish and mystical elements but works with meditative techniques in a quite novel manner. The techniques of meditation become significant for their impact on how a poem works to trace the mind's progress. Yeats's poems, especially his mature poems, develop many of the imageable patterns and employ similar technique. There is a close correspondence between meditative discipline and the creative imagination. If we cannot imagination ourselves as different from what we are and assume that second self, we cannot impose a discipline upon ourselves. It is the creation of this self that a meditative poem records. A self is ideally one with itself, with other human beings, with created nature, and with the supernatural. Thus the self of meditative poetry speaks a language based on that of common men, but includes whatever in its own experience is unique and individual. In conclusion, Yeats' meditation allows him to reach that Unity of Being where the oppositions of change and changelessness, time and eternity, are reconciled. Toward the union of "the powers of the soul," Yeats's "Unity of Being" by disciplined effort makes his way, while creation of the poetry plays its part in the struggle. Unity of Being is both the resolution to the tension between opposites and the point at which all things connect.

However hard a poet may cry out 'art for art's sake', art works are likely to be evaluated by the political surroundings: a poet is very likely to represent the class he belongs to and to react to the political situation through his own works. A poet who suffers from the turmoil of the transitional period can be a victim of the period in the sense that he can be evaluated irrespective of the real value of his works. This paper is motivated by our current social phenomena that the fanatical nationalism to evacuate the past is also applied to the work of reevaluating writers of the past as well as of the present; interestingly, the same situation happened to Yeats. This paper starts with some hypothesis that the primary reason for the lower reevaluation of Yeats since the birth of Free State until its rebirth as a member of E.U. is that he belonged to the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy. And then this paper investigates identity and contribution of the Anglo-Irish to Irish history. And finally this paper tries to find out how Yeats reacted to the radical change of hegemony especially after Responsibilities. The investigation into his poems leads us to the conviction that in his first stage, he wanted to surrender his half-blooded Englishness to his another half-blooded Irishness. This explains why he tried to dig up the ancient Gaelic culture and to advocate the Gaelic Catholic in his first stage. However we can witness his changing attitude after the Easter Rising: some threat from the majority Catholic fanaticism awakened Yeats's self-recognition as an Anglo-Irish, advocating their class and culture in his poems since Responsibilities. It follows that although Yeats wanted to be an artist for art as such, he could not but seek for reconciliation of two aspects of Ireland, -that is, its religion and ethnicity. Yeats's poetry reflects the shift in the political hegemony and the definition of the Irish identity. My conclusion is as follows. The main reason Yeats's evaluation was going down during the period Ireland was being established as a republic country is that he belonged to the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, the past power group. Through Yeats's poems we can witness the decline and agony of the Anglo-Irish during the birth of Republic of Ireland. Therefore the historical contribution of the Anglo-Irish is to be reevaluated; Yeats's Literary Revival is also referred to as "a cracked mirror of the servant". By reading again Yeats's poems from the new perspective towards Yeats as an Anglo-Irish, we can see that Yeats's advocacy of the Anglo-Irish was made only after he was threatened by the fanatical Catholic nationalism and that he adhered to the reconciliation of the divided Ireland throughout his life. Meanwhile, this study leads to another question: Is it possible that the art is free from the political pressure or turmoil? In my opinion, although art is not free from that situation, it can only survive when it shines in the filthy tide, searching for the independence and freedom. I think W.B. Yeats is an example.

Yeats and Pound were the two central poets of the 20th century, dominating the modernist poetry in the first half and second half of the century. Pound began as Yeats's "student" reading the older poet's The Wind among the Reeds. When the apprenticeship with Yeats at Stone Cottage was over, Pound served as patron to almost all the major poets and writers, and some painters. Unlike the mythology of the last 50 years, in matters of poetic influence between them, Pound seems to have got more than he gave to Yeats. For instance, Pound could not find the value of the new poetic form emerging in Yeats's "Adam's Curse" which is alongside "Red Hanrahan's Song about Ireland." It is because he admired the early Yeats so much. It is not until Pound was bored by the shadows and dreams in his own poetry that he began to see "Adam's Curse," "No Second Troy," "Reconciliation." Before Pound did anything, Yeats had already undegone some transformation in his poetry. Then, why Pound had been so immersed in the early Yeats? Yeats had been a complex personality, capable of making use of what had seemed impossible as material for poetry: magic and mysticism, arts, folkore, Romantic poetics in his earlier career and politics, Noh drama, philosophy. At the last moment Yeats and Pound emerge as different poets; the older poet neither commits himself to his world nor alienates himself from it: he contemplates it as detached artist. Pound, on the other hand, chooses to be in utter solitude, with his memories of Stone Cottage sustaining him.

William Butler Yeats was born at Georgeville, Sandymount Avenue, Dublin, in 1865, and died in the South of France, in January 28, 1939. Yeats was fifty in 1915-1916. He provides a poetic rendering of his visionary experience at his fiftieth year in the fourth section of "Vacillation" written in November 1931, when he became absorbed in the philosophical thinking while writing A Vision: "My fiftieth year had come and gone,/ I sat, a solitary man,/ In a crowded London shop,/ An open book and empty cup/ On the marble table-top./ While on the shop and street I gazed/ My body of a sudden blazed;/ And twenty minutes more or less/ It seemed, so great my happiness,/ That I was blessed and could bless."(CPN 251). In May 9, 1917, recalling his fiftieth year, Yeats describes this experience in a prose, entitled "Anima Mundi": "Perhaps I am sitting in some crowded restaurant, the open book beside me, or closed, my excitement having overbrimmed the page. I look at the strangers near as if I had known them all my life, and it seems strange that I cannot speak to them: everything fills me with affection, I have no longer any fears of any needs; I do not even remember that this happy mood must come to an end. It seems as if the vehicle had suddenly grown pure and far extended and so luminous that the images from Anima Mundi, embodied there and drunk with that sweetness, would, like a country drunkard who has thrown a wisp into his own thatch, burn up time." (Myth 364-5) Seamus Heaney was born in April 13, 1939 in Count Derry, Northern Ireland, and has been attacking Yeats since 1980s for the latter's aristocratic mysticism and spiritual matters. Heaney gave a lecture at Oxford University in 1990, entitled "Joy or Night: Last Things in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats and Philip Larkin." This lecture was given at the end of his own fiftieth year and simultaneously commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of Yeats's death. In this lecture, Heaney comes to open up "a sudden comprehension" to Yeats's vacillating visionary experience of the spirit in "The Cold Heaven": "The spirit's vulnerability, the mind's awe at the infinite spaces and its bewilderment at the implacable inquisition which they representall of this is simultaneously present" (The Redress of Poetry 148). In "Fostering," a poem from Seeing Things (1991), Heaney professes his poetic admission of Yeatsian visionary position: "Me waiting until I was nearly fifty/ To credit marvels" (50). In short, Heaney reaches what Yeats did for the spiritual world. The main objective of this paper is to demonstrate how Heaney reacts Yeats's poetry of vision. My focus is on the year fifty, when they erupt their creative energy in terms of "vacillation"which nevertheless shows the provocative and violent dynamism of the Yeatsian "interlocking gyres."

This paper focuses on the similarities and differences between Robert Browning's dramatic monologue and W. B. Yeats's mask theory. Even though two poets were not contemporaries, it is very interesting that they show some similarities in poetic skills and subjects. Unlike Romantics revealing a poet's subjective feeling directly in their poems, Robert Browning created the dramatic monologue to develop the field of the objective expression. In his “dramatic monologue,” a character instead of the poet utters the speech that makes up the whole of the poem, in a specific situation at a critical moment. This person addresses and interacts with other people and we know of his presence, as well as what they say and do, only from the clues in the discourse of the single speaker. In his “My Last Duchess” the Duke is negotiating with an emissary for a second marriage, and the reader can know the speaker's cruel character and intentions. In his “Andrea Del Sarto,” though Andrea was one of the greatest painters in the Renaissance period, he was a failure as an artist because of his artistic passion and indomitable spirit. Excusing his artistic frustration, he once more tries to believe his wife's lies. When Yeats entered art school in Dublin in 1884, he was an enthusiastic reader of English poetry, especially Browning. Yeats was an admiring reader of Browning's poetry, and Browning was one of the nineteenth-century forefather poets of Yeats. He explored, as Browning did, the themes of creative men divided within themselves and struggling to unify their inspirations toward love and intellect, aesthetic contemplation and heroic action. In this process, Yeats developed the concept of masks from the other self in contrast to the natural self perceiving a man as the conflicting existence between subjectivity and objectivity. In his doctrine of mask, Yeats provided a formal aesthetic for the poet's need to speak dramatically through the masks of other personalities; Browning had long practised dramatic poetry in principle in which he donned the masks of personalities totally unlike his own. Browning tended to hide his interests behind the masks of his characters, whereas Yeats more openly voiced a variety of mystical and antithetical thoughts. Yeats happened to find an occasional, almost incidental similarity of language and a shared attitude toward the sources of poetic inspiration with Browning's. By 1929, when he was sixty-four years old, rewriting and revising his poetry with an eye to a collected edition, he announced that he would be turned from Browning. Yeats was an appreciative reader of the older poet, but the great achievement of Yeats's poetry transformed and transcended the influence of Browning.

William Butler Yeats was born at Georgeville, Sandymount Avenue, Dublin, in 1865, and died in the South of France, in January 28, 1939. Yeats was fifty in 1915-1916. He provides a poetic rendering of his visionary experience at his fiftieth year in the fourth section of "Vacillation" written in November 1931, when he became absorbed in the philosophical thinking while writing A Vision: "My fiftieth year had come and gone,/ I sat, a solitary man,/ In a crowded London shop,/ An open book and empty cup/ On the marble table-top./ While on the shop and street I gazed/ My body of a sudden blazed;/ And twenty minutes more or less/ It seemed, so great my happiness,/ That I was blessed and could bless."(CPN 251). In May 9, 1917, recalling his fiftieth year, Yeats describes this experience in a prose, entitled "Anima Mundi": "Perhaps I am sitting in some crowded restaurant, the open book beside me, or closed, my excitement having overbrimmed the page. I look at the strangers near as if I had known them all my life, and it seems strange that I cannot speak to them: everything fills me with affection, I have no longer any fears of any needs; I do not even remember that this happy mood must come to an end. It seems as if the vehicle had suddenly grown pure and far extended and so luminous that the images from Anima Mundi, embodied there and drunk with that sweetness, would, like a country drunkard who has thrown a wisp into his own thatch, burn up time." (Myth 364-5) Seamus Heaney was born in April 13, 1939 in Count Derry, Northern Ireland, and has been attacking Yeats since 1980s for the latter's aristocratic mysticism and spiritual matters. Heaney gave a lecture at Oxford University in 1990, entitled "Joy or Night: Last Things in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats and Philip Larkin." This lecture was given at the end of his own fiftieth year and simultaneously commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of Yeats's death. In this lecture, Heaney comes to open up "a sudden comprehension" to Yeats's vacillating visionary experience of the spirit in "The Cold Heaven": "The spirit's vulnerability, the mind's awe at the infinite spaces and its bewilderment at the implacable inquisition which they representall of this is simultaneously present" (The Redress of Poetry 148). In "Fostering," a poem from Seeing Things (1991), Heaney professes his poetic admission of Yeatsian visionary position: "Me waiting until I was nearly fifty/ To credit marvels" (50). In short, Heaney reaches what Yeats did for the spiritual world. The main objective of this paper is to demonstrate how Heaney reacts Yeats's poetry of vision. My focus is on the year fifty, when they erupt their creative energy in terms of "vacillation"which nevertheless shows the provocative and violent dynamism of the Yeatsian "interlocking gyres."

Ireland abounds in narrative stories, including mythologies, sagas, legends and folktales, handed down through many generations from the ancient pagan period. In Ireland, especially in the western country Sligo where W. B. Yeats spent the better part of his early days, one cannot go far without hearing the mystic stories of pagan gods, nymphs and ghosts. The Irish are very proud of their unique and traditional Celtic culture and they still believe that the supernatural beings haunt everywhere and intervene in their human affairs. Yeats was educated in England and greatly influenced by many English writers and poets. Yeats, however, born with Celtic spirit and encouraged by the patriot John O’Leary, determined to be a national poet. Therefore, he began to write his early romantic narratives and dramatic verses based on the ancient Irish myths and legends, following the two brilliant predecessors Samuel Ferguson and William Allingham. Besides, what is more important than anything else, he usually put his own life and his unrequited love for Maud Gonne by modifying their themes and symbols into the ancient stories. Thus he succeeded in creating utterly new myths much familiar not only to the Irish today but also to the modern people abroad. Hence he was a renowned myth-maker and -modifier of the age

“All noble things are the result of warfare; great nations and classes, of warfare in the visible world, great poetry and philosophy, of invisible warfare, the division of mind within itself" said Yeats. Warfares between thesis and antithesis, whether visible or invisible, lie at the heart of Yeats's poetic world, enabling the poet to create the enormously powerful poetic text. In “Meditations in Time of Civil War”, both visible and invisible warfares are overlapped each other, intensifying the division of the poet's own mind, revealing the bitter agony of the poetic self to criticize and remake itself. This poem dramatizes a story of the poet's self-criticism and self-recreation through the warfare between History, the Irish Civil War, and the poet's dream as a cultural nationalist to re-establish and preserve the Irish identity. In “Ancestral Houses”, the poet dreams to redeem the eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish aristocratic ideals for making the unitary Irish mind, only to realize its impossibility. In “My House" through “My Descendants”, the poet seeks to re-establish the Irish identity in his own sanctuary, Thoor Ballylee, through the poetic task to break “the symbolic rose" into flower, only to fail in it, for he has excluded and suppressed History, the Irish Civil War, from his mind. The poet's dream is broken up. In “The Road at My Door" and “The Stare's Nest by My Window", the poet encounters the Civil War face to face, struggling to transform its violence and bitterness into ‘sweetness' and pursuing his dream once more, but it's far from being realized. In “I see Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart's Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness", the poet internalizes the violent and bitter Irish historical realities through his vigorous imagination, severely criticizing himself as a solitary Platonist and remaking his poetic self a more solid one. In “The Tower", written next to this poem, we can meet the enormous power of his recreated poetic self.

Aiming to understand the poetry of W. B. Yeats in terms of gender, sexuality, and politics, this paper reads some major poems of his early years. The first part of the paper reads the poems in which the masculine world of war, science, and political power is negated in favor of the feminine world of nature, poetry, and wisdom. The present writer of the paper considers that the femininity of these poems, expressed in the pastoral world of the shepherd, or the stories of Irish legendary King Goll, Fergus, and the fairyland, comes from Yeats's poetic attempt to surmount the British imperial and materialistic world by enhancing the Irish cultural traditions and values. The next part reads a group of poems which deal with Yeats's love of Maud Gonne. Using the image of the rose or the courtly genre, both of them being old traditional poetic conventions, the poet represents Maud Gonne either as a goddess of eternal beauty or a woman of heroic nobility. However, she is also represented as a woman of "lonely face" and "pilgrim soul," a woman who brings "the sorrow of love," or a woman repeatedly associated with the tragic world of Troy. This ambivalence or double vision in the poet's representation of her seems to result form Yeats's ambiguous attitude to Maud Gonne and her revolutionary and social work. The last part of the paper deals with two poems and a play which represent Ireland as a woman. The use of a woman figure as symbolic image of Ireland, especially Yeats's use of Cathleen ni Houlihan in his poetry and drama, is important, because it most distinctively reveals the relations between sexual politics and aesthetic value in the early poetry of Yeats. In this respect, the writer of this paper notes that the woman figure in these works is a highly romanticized and idealized one, rather than a real one with human body and sexual desire, and thinks that this is related to Yeats's version of Iriish nationalism with its strengths and limitations.

Yeats received a letter from Sturge Moore complaining about the way he dealt with the goldsmith's bird in his “Sailing to Byzantium”. After Yeats had done a complete version of “Byzantium”, he wrote to Sturge Moore saying, "The poem originates from a criticism of yours." He added that the idea needed exposition. The focus of this paper is to discuss what that idea was which needed exposition. Frank Kermode maintained that Yeats wrote the latter poem to make more absolute the distinction between the goldsmith's bird as the Image and the natural bird. On the other hand, A. E. Dyson argued that Moore's criticism "can be safely ignored." Balancing these two contrary views, we have to rely on what Yeats himself implies as to this topic. What Yeats has to say about Byzantium as a symbolic city can be found in his poem itself and in his book A Vision. In the poem, we find the following expressions, "A Starlet or moonlit dome disdains / All that man is, / All mere complexities / The fury and the mire of human veins." As is evident to all Yeats students, a starlet night is a moonless night, phase 1 (complete objectivity) and a moonlit night is a full moon (complete subjectivity) in his system. These two phases represent superhuman purity. At these two phases human life cannot exist; for all human life entails a mixture of the subjective and the objective, hence "mere complexities." But their importance lies in the fact that they point to two different directions for human beings to pursue perfection. He wrote in his A Vision, "in early Byzantium, maybe never before or since in recorded history, religious, aesthetic and practical life were one." In addition, we have a great dome, symbolic of inclusiveness and the process of purgation in stanzas 4 and 5. We can infer that Yeats tried to represent Byzantium as an ideal city where "religious, aesthetic and practical life" are lived out in harmony with the vision of perfection available to man. But as night becomes day in Byzantium itself, "unpurged images" will surge upon the streets of Byzantium, and so goes on and on the process of purgation.

Per Amica Silentia Lunae (Yeats translated it into Through the Friendly Silences of Moon) was written between January and May of 1917, and consists of a Prologue and an Epilogue for Iseult Gonne, "Ego Dominus Tuss," Anima Hominis and Anima Mundi. In Anima Mundi Yeats said, "I have always sought to bring my mind close to the mind of Indian and Japanese poets, old women in Connacht, mediums in Soho, lay brothers whom I imagine dreaming in some mediaeval monastery the dreams of their village, learned authors who refer all to antiquity: to immerse it in the general mind where that mind is scarce separable from what we have began to call 'the subconscious'... ." In the background of his theory of anti-self there are Indian and Japanese Religious thought, Celtic folklore, Spiritualism, the Order of Golden Dawn, and the great poet Dante. "Ego Dominus Tuss" is a dialogue between two men, Hic and Ille, who discuss poetry and creative process. Ille, like Yeats, is a daimonic poet walking in the moonlight. For Yeats, lunar and subjective were always the antitheses to solar and objective. Poesis called for complete subjectivity, for entry into the friendly silence of the moon. The moon is always associated with feminine divinity. With the help of a mask, Ille is calling to the opposite of his daily self, his anti-self. In the end of the poem, Ille found his anti-self. In Anima Hominis Yeats said that the saint like Christ and Buddha, and the poets like Dante and Keats attained the anti-self. The anti-self is a egoless self, the higher self. Saint, hero, and poet are all inspired. Yeats said, "Saint or hero works in his own flesh and blood and not in paper or parchment, have more deliberate understanding of that other flesh and blood." Only when Yeats became the anti-self could he become a totally subjective mind, overcome the illusion of duality, and find a "revelation of realty." Yeats could receive daimonic inspiration only during visionary experiences. Finally Yeats found the anti-self he felt ecstasy. According to his theory, the production of art was an expression of the artist's longing for "Unity of Being." In Per Amica silentia Lunae Yeats said "the poet, because he may not stand within the sacred house but lives amid the whirlwinds that beset its threshold, may find his pardon."

예이츠(W. B. Yeats)는 평생 프랑스, 파리를 10여 차례나 방문하여, 길게는 46일간 체류하면서, 많은 문인들과 신비주의자들과 교류하고, 공연을 보고, 작품을 쓰거나 구상하며, 대마초 -당시는 불법이 아니었지만- 를 피우기도 한다. 그러나, 흥미롭게도, 그가 장기간 머물고 있던 때는, 자신의 평생의 연인인 모드 곤이 파리에, 혹은 노르망디에 거주하고 있었다. 물론, 최초로 파리에 머물 때는 메이더스의 집에 머물었고, 그 다음에는 호텔 꼬르네이유라는 문인들이 모이는 곳에서 작품을 쓴다는 목적이었다. 그러나, 모드 곤과의 첫 키스가 있은 직후는, 파리의 그녀의 집에서, 또 마지막 청혼을 할 때는 노르망디의 그녀의 집에서 머문다. 그리고, 예이츠가 조지와 결혼한 후에는 9년간 파리를 방문하지 않는다. 훨씬 후 병이 나자 치료하려 프랑스 남쪽을 찾고, 나중에는 그곳에서 사망하고 묻힌다. 그러나, 모드 곤에 이끌려, 파리를 방문하지만, 예이츠는 이곳에서 많은 것을 얻어간다. 파리에 머물면서 쓴 그의 편지는, 당시의 그의 심경, 상황, 문학관, 예술관, 등등 많은 것을 엿볼 수 있게 해준다. 이 논문은 이미 많이 다루어진 인물 보다는, 덜 다루어진 사람들과의 교류를 보여주는 편지의 소개에 중점을 둔다.