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.

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 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.

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.

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."

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.

아일랜드와 우리 대한민국은 거의 같은 시기인 20세기 초반에 독립운동이 있었고 또한 20세기 중반이라는 거의 같은 시기에 공화국의 형태로 재탄생했지만, 아직까지 국토의 완전한 회복이 이루어지지 못하고 서로 다른 국가나 체제로 분리되어 있으면서 통합된 한 국가가 되려는 꿈을 버리지 못하고 있다. 아일랜드의 통합은 종교, 인종, 정치 문화적 색채의 차이점 때문에 우리의 통합보다 더 어려울 수도 있겠지만, 다른 한편으로는 800년 이상의 혼종화 현상과 이민 그리고 유럽연합으로의 정체성을 확장시킨 점 때문에 다양성을 수용함에 잘 훈련됨으로써 지역화와 세계화의 조화 속에서 그 갈등이 더 쉽게 풀릴 수도 있다고 생각한다. 대한민국의 경우는 단일 민족, 단일 문화 때문에 더 쉽게 통합될 가능성이 있으나 아일랜드의 경우와 달리 자유와 전제라는 극단적인 이질적 정치체제와 지역적 색채화만을 수용하려는 민족주의가 정치적 봉건화를 지탱시켜 세계화로부터 고립될 수 있는 위험성을 안고 있다. 또 다른 위험요소로는 통합의 과정에서 이루어지는 필수적인 사항으로 탈식민화을 위한 저항과 곧 이어 헤게모니 싸움으로의 내전이 수반될 수 있다. 이 논문을 쓴 동기와 목적은 요사이 회자되나 그 정의가 정립되지 않은 ‘통일’이라는 용어 등을 미래에 바람직하게 정의내릴 필요성을 느꼈기 때문이고 이것을 위해 거의 같은 상황 속에서 바람직하게 발전해가는 아일랜드를 연구해 우리의 문제점을 해결해 보려함에 있다. 아일랜드의 현대 역사는 영국과의 탈 식민전쟁, 그리고 내란으로 이루어지는 시기에 있어 다수인 게일 카톨릭이 과거 지배층인 소수 앵글로 아이리시를 패배시키는 과정, 그 과정에서 수반된 정치와 문화적 측면에서의 민족주의 강화, 그 후에 유럽연합의 일원으로 지역화와 세계화의 조화등으로 정의내릴 수 있겠다. 특히 이 논문에서는 앵글로 아이리시 계급에 속한 예이츠와 회복되지 못한 땅, 북아일랜드의 소수파였던 히니라는 두 시인이 탈식민과 내전에 어떻게 반응했으며 그들이 어떤 식으로 해결을 원했는가를 알아보기 위해 그들의 시를 다시 읽어보고, 한 국가 안에 존재하는 서로 다른 계급의 두 시인이 통합 아일랜드에 대해 지녔던 의견의 차이와 공통점을 찾아내어 우리의 가장 바람직한 통일론을 모색하려 했다. 그런데 두 시인의 가장 큰 공통점은, 종교와 인종면에서 지배, 피지배의 차이가 있을지라도 그 둘 모두 정치, 종교, 인종에 있어 자신들이 속한 공동체의 편견을 극복하고 문화적 공동기반을 다지려 했고 또 시인과 예술의 자유를 추구한 점일 것이다. 한편 그 둘 사이의 차이점은 그 방법론에 있었다. 예를 들면, 그 둘 다 종교와 인종의 편견을 뛰어넘으려는 의도로 조상의 뿌리를 켈트에서 찾을 지라도 아일랜드 자치국의 성립과 더불어 기울어가는 앵글로 아이리시에 속한 예이츠는 처음에는 카톨릭 민족주의 색채를 수용하지만 후기에는 기우는 신교 앵글로-아이리시의 문화를 옹호하려는 균형감각을 고취시키려 했다. 한편 히니는 처음에는 억압받는 북아일랜드의 소수파로서 영국에 저항하는 민족주의 색채로 출발할 지라도 민족주의의 과격성과 카톨릭 공동체가 갖는 편견과 폭력을 배격하고 양심공화국으로의 통합아일랜드를 역설한다. 결론적으로 두 시인은 정치와 종교, 인종의 차이가 강화시킨 배타성보다는 문화적 유대감을 강화시키려는 화해와 상생의 의도를 갖고 있다. 이 둘 모두 지배 문화인 영국을 완전히 배제하지 않으면서 자신들의 정체성을 미국, 유럽으로 확장시켜 그 국수성을 지양해 갔음도 알 수 있었다. 즉, 이 두 시인에게서 민족주의는 문화적 정체성을 확립하는 일에 역점을 둔 것으로 그 과정에서 호전성과 배타성보다는 화해를 통해 식민화에서 파생된 이질성과 혼종을 받아들였기 때문에 지역성과 세계화를 조화시킬 수 있었다. 마지막 결론은 우리의 통합에도 국수적 민족주의와 맞물려 있는 정치적 봉건성으로의 퇴보보다는 지역과 세계화의 기류 속에서 문화의 정체성을 추구함이 선행되어져야 할 것이다.

예이츠(W. B. Yeats)는 화가를 아버지로, 화가 수업을 받은 시인이었다. 시인으로 성장하면서 문인 못지 않게 여러 화가들과 예술가적 환경에서 생활하였는데, 그의 저술 여기저기에 회화에 대한 언급이 많다. 따라서 그의 시의 형성에는 화가적 시학이 깊이 뿌리내리고 있다고 보아도 틀리지 않다는 전제가 이 논문의 바탕이 된다. 그리고 그의 시작 초기에 결정적 영향을 준 사람이 시인이며 화가인 영국의 대표적 낭만주의 시인인 블래이크(William Blake)이다. 예이츠는 이 시인을 두 번에 걸쳐 편집하고, 곧 이어서 두 편의 글 “회화의 상징성” (1898년)과 “시의 상징성” (1900년)을 발표한다. 이 작업을 통해 예이츠시의 골격이 형성되었다고 해도 과언이 아니다. 이 시기의 시들은 회화의 상징주의와 잘 비교 대조된다. 이 시기 이전의 예이츠는 힘이 부족한 것처럼 보인다. 예이츠시는 본질적으로 고전적인 회화적 형상성을 처음부터 보이나 상징적 특정이 가미되면서 시는 더욱 깊어진다. 예이츠 시의 또 다른 특성은 추상성이다. 이 특성은 예이츠가 의도적으로 시도했다기보다 선구적인 그의 기질이 이런 시를 만들게 했다고 보인다. 추상주의 미술은 아직 등장하지 않았으나, 예이츠는 “추상”이라는 용어를 종종 사용한다. 이러한 회화와 시 읽기에서 다루어지는 작품과 작가는 들라크루와(Delacroix)와 예이츠, 예이츠와 셰익스피어, 「레다와 백조」(Leda and the Swan)와 「비너스와 아도니스」(Venus and Adonis), 블래이크와 예이츠 및 「방울 달린 모자」(The Cap and Bells,) 귀스타브 모로(Gustave Moreau)와 예이츠, 모로의 회화작품들, 「쿨 장원의 야생 백조」(The Wild Swans at Coole)와 후기인상파 화가들 및 모로, 예이츠와 화가 시인 컴밍스(e e cummings) 등이다.

Baile and Aillinn, based on a pagan myth of ancient Ireland, is a long narrative poem which expresses Yeats’s private love story along with his deep interest in his fatherland and its national literature. Naturally, Yeats enlarged the simple plot of the story which tells about the two lovers’ death and their going to live in Aengus’s land among the dead. He also partly created his own private myth in order to transmit his many-folded intent. By clothing each mythical character with a role and symbol appropriate for his purpose, he succeeded in making his poem overcome the limitation of private utterance and making it a poem with both individuality and universality. The death of Baile and Aillinn has a duplicate symbolic meaning. Firstly, their death is an inevitable ritual process to get an eternal beatitude through the union after death and a sort of sublimation of a tragic love, in which we can glimpse at the poet’s plaintive love for Gonne. Secondly, their death is a kind of ritual murder symbolizing a Messianism of the Irish desiring for liberation from inveterate poverty and oppression over time. In conclusion, Baile and Aillinn is an excellent piece showing Yeats’s seasoned poetic technique of creating a poem with new meaning through mythologizing with great subtlety not only his own autobiographical elements but also the national feelings of the Irish people.

Yeats was interested in imagination as he was familiar with the function and value of imagination. For him, Imagination is a kind of creative principle; it is like an almighty divine god. By using and developing the power of imagination we can do anything. The ultimate aim of imagination is to create a paradise in this world from now to eternity. It is, however, too difficult to make such images, as we wish to. Though difficult, it is not impossible to do so. According to Bergson, the possible and the real are not essentially different qualities; they are originally the same attributes; furthermore, all material things are to be formed by the gathering together of images―the world of imagination consists of numerous images. Thus, we, with the marvellous power of imagination, can have the infinite power and intelligence, which resemble those of God. Nonetheless, we are sad for many human conditions that restrict us. But Yeats praises the human souls that overcome such conditions with full arduous life. As he awakens mentally, he comes to find the concept of taking pains -labor-; he needs to make constant efforts to realize the imagination as he wants it, wholeheartedly. To Yeats, such a hard process of living itself is man's sublimity. He concludes that in struggling against the terrible condition of life man will come closer to the attributes of God.

W. B. Yeats is one of the most important philosophical poets who tried to incorporate history, society, art, and literature in their poems. He proved that the human desire to create the 'Self' through the literature was possible. The developmental process of his literature shows a long way to his destination : freedom of the human soul. It was natural that he has accepted various Eastern and Western philosophies to achieve his goal. Yeats utilized the Indian thoughts in his works and he did it through his own ways. Moreover, he popularized the Indians spiritual life in his works. He tried hard to give an organic unity to his whole works. Especially, he expressed the results of his efforts along his life for his desire for the spirit and its freedom in a raw. It was an unavoidable thing to accept the Oriental thoughts to him, and they effected so much to him to remain in his spiritual world. Among them there was a Cyclical System from the Indian philosophy as a mystic experience to resolve the conflict. The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the influences of Eastern philosophy on Yeats. Secondly, the developmental process of Cycle whose completed forms, such as a gyre or a circle, can be found in A Vision, are traced through the analysis of Yeats’s verse. The ultimate role of the system is the realization of the Unity of Being, which is the state of harmony and unity through the conflicts of the opposites such as life and death, subjectivity and objectivity, and soul and body, etc.

W. B. Yeats poetic purpose is to advocate to Sophia who is suffering in the world with mankind as a hidden God and the feminine principle in Christian Gnostic myth. He searched for two of Sophia’s aspects: Mother and Daughter Sophia. Yeats believed that Mother Sophia abodes in heaven. On the other hand, Daughter Sophia is suffering in the world, and he thought himself as a chosen man of the sole priest for Daughter Sophia. Yeats tried to dedicate his life for Daughter Sophia from his early rose poetry. The immortal rose is a symbol of Helen of Troy or Countess Cathleen who sacrificed her life for rescuing her people’s souls. Yeats also waited for the time of the recovery of Sophia’s glory again. The decided time is coming to follow the theory of the Gyres in A Vision. After dominating the masculine gyre for 2000 years, the androcentric society will disappear by returning to the feminine gyre. Yeats thought the new age would be dominated by Sophia who was not only feminine but androgynous. Yeats also called the new age a ‘rosy peace’ which is a symbol of ’Unity of Being’ and the immortal world. Yeats was eager to search for achieving ‘Unity of Being’ by uniting with Sophia. As he got older, he was a passionate old man who still indulged in Sophia. Yeats believed in Sophia as a hidden and defeated god. But when decided time comes, Sophia will be recovered her glory. In “The second coming,” Sophia as an androgynous god, is symbolized by the sphinx. Yeats often used to the sphinx image to explain Sophia. Especially, the sphinx is identified with the Judge of the Last Judgement. It is important to the symbol of Sphinx’s eyes; ‘a blank and pitiless as the sun.’ The sun symbolizes God’s fury of the Last Judgement as well as the unchangeable supernatural world. Sphinx’s eyes of the sun image are compared with the cat’s eyes of the moon. The moon is a symbol of the wheel of reincarnation and mortal world. In A Vision, the moon has 28 aspects as a symbol of the wheel of reincarnation. Sophia has controlled the souls after death by following the rules of the moon’s 28 aspects. Yeats symbolized Sophia as the Judge of all souls by portraying her as a ‘cook.’ On the contrary, when the sphinx comes, there will be no more the moon’s changeable aspects in the world. Therefore, although the sphinx looks like an evil image, it is only a symbol of Sophia. Yeats always wanted to be Sophia’s sole priest. So he was a Christian Gnostic priest just as W. Blake. In fact, he identified with Ribh who was his poetic hero as well as the Christian Gnostic priest. God’s fury and the rough sphinx image are paradoxical symbols of the God’s glory and the age of the rosy peace. The sphinx’s ‘pitiless eye’ is connected with the horseman’s ‘cold eye’ on his epitaph. The ‘cold eye’ is symbolized to achieve Yeats’s final poetic purpose, ‘Unity of Being.’ That is, the symbol suggested that Yeats would be a Daimon after his death.

The philosophical idea behind ‘The Celtic Twilight’ has never properly been studied. My firm belief is that our full understanding of the work of Yeats is impossible without our thorough recognition of his philosophical idea behind ‘The Celtic Twilight’ in his poetic development. That is why I am going to offer this study as a beginning of the exploration of ‘The Celtic Twilight’ in order to throw light on his literary ideal in his formative years. The Celtic Twilight School, of which W. B. Yeats was the acknowledged, became fashionable during the nineties and had considerable influence: its delicate impressionism, its shadowy themes, other-worldly longings and subtle wavering rhythms were in accord with the Fin de Siecle Movement. ‘The Celtic Twilight’ of the last decade of the century was no new phenomenon in literature. It was essentially a re-naming and re-ordering of a familiar trait, the ‘folk spirit’, marked by the heightened passions and superstitions common to all literature rising from the people, and given new life by the recent scientific studies of folklore and myth culminating in Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough in 1890. In addition, it possessed a strong tendency towards melancholy which attracted the mystics of Maeterlinck’s school. But the new elements in ‘The Celtic Twilight’ was a sense of place, as opposed to a vague atmosphere. Life and mood became more pointed by the close relationship between nature and emotion. In a general sense this element of the Celtic spirit could be considered a natural outgrowth of the Pantheism or nature-worship of the Romantics influenced by the mystics’ renewed interest in Druidism; more specifically it arose from a self-conscious intellectual attempt to inject fresh life into well-known themes and develop a new approach to old form. The symbolist turns from the barren glass of the outer world to the truth embodied in his own heart. To be brought beyond the limitations of his individual being, however, and into communion with the Great Mind and Memory of the Universe, he needs also a ‘traditional mythology’. Yeats turned for this tradition and mythology to the legend and folklore of his own country, for like Synge and Lady Gregory he believed that Irish peasant was untouched by the materialism and scientific investigations resulting from the restless Renaissance, that the Irish peasant still maintained contact with the mystery and imagination that existed before man fell a slave to the external world. His search, consequently, was for the traditions which lay buried in peasants’ huts and cottages. Yeats was an Irish poet on one hand, and a poet interested in magic and occult on the other. Beginning in 1889, he began to integrate his interests and goals, attempting to become one man - an Irish poet, using Irish subject matter, welding into his technique and statements the substance of magic and mythology. As a poet with ambitions to make a ‘new utterance’, Yeats depended on what he could make of the Celtic past for two main reasons: first, his interests and beliefs had directed him toward finding a kind of Ur-mythology from the time when he first discovered the correspondence between Indian, Hermetic, Theosophic, and Blakean thought; second, and of equal importance, was his position as an outsider in contemporary Ireland, his position as an Anglo-Irishman. Yeats turned to pre-Christian Celtic mythology for the basis of his subject matter both to root his poetry and his own sense of being an Irish poet; he sought a mythology for his poetry and for himself. And he claimed that the artists through their “contact with the soil”, that is, the folk, could create a national literature, since folklore is “the soil where all great art is rooted”. Then he studied and used magic, visions, profound legends, Celtic mythologies, poetic traditions, folklore, and history of the Celtic past to make ‘the old culture of Celtic Ireland’ and ‘exaltation of life itself’ come alive and reaffirm the power of imagination and hope. Accordingly his poetry of ‘The Celtic Twilight’ is an affirmation of folklore and mythology. Folklore and mythology are the tools with which to open the Celtic past, make it present, and thus create a great art rooted in the soil of Folk-belief. Folklore was in Yeats’s eyes the perfect expression of the intermediate world in which gods and mortals met, because the peasants regarded the natural objects around him as signs of divine essences. They had, like the ancient Greeks, mythologized their ‘haunted’ surroundings in stories passed on to many later generations through an oral tradition, thus not only preserving the truth about the divine reality, but also producing a heritage still applicable to everyday life. Yeats claimed that Ireland had created ‘the most beautiful literature of a whole people that had been anywhere since Greece and Rome’, while English literature is ‘yet the literature of a few’. The reason was that ‘Irish stories had been made to be spoken or sung’, while English literature ‘had all but completely shaped itself in the printing-press’. Therefore Yeats’s literary ideal was to bridge the written and unwritten traditions, to establish a learned literary tradition on emotions that came from the heart of the people, and to create from the shock of new material and from a tradition that had never found expression in sophisticated literature a new style, a new mood of the soul. In his poetic career he has sought out an ‘image that blossoms a rose’ deep in the heart, an image that makes ‘all nature murmur in response if but a single note be touched’, and has created a literature that ‘taps the secret spring of all our lives’ and achieves the enduring beauty of great art.

Yeats’s study of fairy had occupied him steadily for fifteen years from 1887 to 1902. He continued to study in connection with spiritualism until 1915. Yeats’s own collection of Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry had been published in 1888, Irish Fairy Tales in 1892 and The Celtic Twilight in 1893 before he met Lady Gregory. Any theory about nature of the fairy-faith shared with her came from Yeats, and he claims originality. In writing The Celtic Twilight(1902) his study of fairy was deepened by his collecting trips with Lady Gregory. The result of Yeats’s collaboration with lady Gregory was not to appear until 1920 when she published her two volume edition of Visions and Beliefs in West of Ireland, “Collected and arranged by Lady Gregory: with two essays and notes by W. B. Yeats.” Yeats’s essays(both dated 1914) were “Swedenborg, Mediums and Desolate Places” and “Witches and Wizards in Irish Folk-lore.” Like all the Irish antiquarians, Yeats also commonly referred to the fairies as “the people of Raths,” “the Danaan nations,” “The Tribes of the Goddess Danu,” In Fairy and Folk Tales he explains the Galic terms. The Irish word for fairy is sheehogue[sidheog], a diminutive of “shee” in banshee. Fairies are deenee shee[daoine shee](fairy people) In Irish tradition anyone may be taken by the sidhe, but there is, in fact a hierarchy of those who are most desirable. Yeats follows this tradition in one of his first poems about the sidhe, “The Stolen Child.” As Yeats understood the Irish tradition, the sidhe can do nothing the help of mortals and it is for this reason that they must always seek out humans. When the sidhe takes someone that person is said to be “away.” As a spiritualist would interpret this, it means that the soul has left the body and is travelling with the fairies. Often when appears ill or asleep or “lies in a dead faint upon the ground” it is because that the person is “away.” The Sidhe, according to Yeats’s countrymen, never takes anyone or anything without leaving some changeling in its place. In The Only Jealousy of Emer―Yeats’s most successful and moving dramatization and use of a changeling― Emer guesses that Cuchulain is “away.” When people are taken to live with the sidhe, they take on supernatural powers and work and live just as the Shape Changers that they are amongst. The chief distinction to be made between the shide and the dead is that the dead returns to the earth as ghosts of their former selves, whereas the sidhes are the everlasting ones. The idea that the fairy faith is in reality a doctrine of souls was lent supported by the fact that the country people say that almost all who are dead are taken by the sidhes. As the place where souls temporarily reside, the middle land of the sidhe is the Bardo of the Tibetans, the summerland of the Spiritualists, and ethereal world of theosophy and magic. Yeats saw his studies of spiritualism as a continuation of his studies of fairy, both of them as leading to the beginning of his philosophy. His study of fairy led him to the formulation of two theories that makes his system possible―that of Anima Mundi and that of the “airy body” or “vehicle” of the soul. A Vision is the result of his study about the fairy.

예이츠, 엘리오트, 조이스등 모더니즘 문학작품 속에서 독자는 서구문명을 비판하는 목소리를 들을 수 있다. 모더니즘 문학은 르네상스 이후 4세기를 주도하면서 이루어낸 영국적 실용가치관이 주도한 현대문명을 비판한다. 가까이는 영국빅토리아 시대의 극단적인 형태의 정치, 경제, 도덕, 문화에 대한 공격인 것이다. 즉, 정치에 있어서는 제국주의, 경제에 있어서는 자본주의, 도덕과 문화에 있어서는 속물주의, 종교에 있어서는 기독교에 대한 반성과 해부를 그 특징으로 한다. 무엇보다 예술이 도덕, 정치, 종교의 시녀의 역할에서 벗어나 예술자체로 독립할 것을 주장한다. 따라서 예술은 그 실용성보다는 미 자체로 다시 태어날 것을 주장하고 있다. 예이츠의 부르주아 문명에 대한 비판은 그의 영적이고 시골적인 것을 찬미하는 기질과 그의 18세기 앵글로 아이리쉬 문화에 대한 애착 그리고 순진하고 신선한 원시성을 지닌 아일랜드 풍물에 대한 매튜 아놀드 같은 이의 찬미에 힘입어 주로 실용적 가치관으로 무장한 아일랜드 중산 계급의 심미적인 결핍을 공격하는 양상을 띤다. 한편, “재림”이라는 시에서는 서구문명의 해체까지를 예언하며, 또 한편으로 “비잔틴으로의 항해”에서는 예술에 의해서만 지배되는 세계를 그려낸다. 그의 문명비판의 특징을 좀 더 확실히 규명하기 위해, 서구 문명을 소유와 지배로 규정한 아도르노와 비교해 본 결과, 예이츠가 부르주아의 소유욕을 비판할 지라도 아도르노처럼, 서구 문명에 내재된 착취, 지배라는 사회학적 억압기재를 찾아내지 못했다. 돈과 실용적 가치관으로 무장한 자본주의에 심취한 부르주아는 죽음을 미적으로 승화시킬 능력이 없고 성적에너지를 자연스럽게 구가할 수 없었으므로 그의 공격 대상이 되었을 뿐이었다. 다시 말하면 예이츠는 아도르노처럼, 문명을 지배와 억압이라는 사회학적인 차원으로 비판하기보다는 시적 가치와 미적인 삶을 충실히 구가할 수 없게 하는 파괴자로 인식한 것이다. 그런데 예이츠가 지배의 구조를 서구 문명 안에서 찾아내지 못한 것과 달리 그는 예술로만 지배되는 이상적 국가를 제시한 점은 그 역시 부르주아로서의 지배 욕구를 나타낸 것으로 볼 수 있다. 다시 말하면 예이츠는 문명의 속성인 지배를 향유한 계급으로서 지배와 착취의 현장을 외면했으며 피지배자들을 동정하기보다 그들의 미적인 결핍을 지적했다. 특히 그가 예술로만 지배되는 파시즘적인 미학을 가진 것에서 그의 부르주아로서의 지배이데올로기는 살아있다고 말 할 수밖에 없다. 예이츠와 대다수 아일랜드인의 공동 목표는 아일랜드적 문화를 만들려는 데서는 공통점을 보일지라도 정치와 경제적 독립을 이루는 면에 있어, 서로의 감각은 매우 큰 차이를 드러냈다고 평가된다. 그 당시 대다수의 아일랜드인들이 예이츠의 문학을 “노예의 깨어진 거울”로 평가 절하시킨 것이라든지 아일랜드 내에서 예이츠 미학에 대해 별로 호응이 없었던 것도 예이츠가 자신의 시에서 착취당하는 자와 착취의 현장을 외면한 것과 어느 정도 관련이 있다. 즉, 정치와 경제, 사회계급에 민감했던 아일랜드 중산계층은 예이츠의 예술 지상국 창조를 하나의 환상으로 보았을 가능성과 자신들에 대한 예이츠의 공격을 새롭게 도전하는 노예에 대한 상전의 방어로 보았을 가능성을 열어놓는다.

Yeats published the first edition of A Vision in 1925 and the revised edition in 1937. He had poured the most intense concentration of his intellect into it for 20 years. It may be regarded as the greatest of Yeats’s works, containing some of the most penetrating and beautiful prose that he wrote. It is essential to any understanding of many of his most notable poems and plays. But many critics agreed it was difficult to read and understand; it is extraordinarily distilled, yet complex in an extremely precise way. In this thesis I compared “Unity of Being” in Yeats’s A Vision with “Dao” in Lao Zi’s Dao De Jing. I interpreted the similarity between the theories of Yeats and Lao Zi. In A Vision Yeats explained 28 incarnations according to the 28 phases of the moon, the Great Wheel and the deliverance of the bond of rebirth. His major symbols are the gyres, the double triangle or the primary or objective and the antithetical or subjective. The Four Faculties(Will, Mask, Creative Mind, and Body of Fate) and the Four Principles(Husk, Passionate Body, Spirit, and Celestial Body) are related to the two contrasting tinctures. The antithetical gyre is lunar, aesthetic, expressive, multiple, hierarchial, aristocratic, artistic, particular, creative. The primary gyre is solar, moral, dogmatic unifying, humane, democratic, scientific, abstract. There is a state of perpetual conflit between the gyres and the moment of harmony of the gyres. The gyres are living each other’s death, dying each other's life. In Dao De Jing Lao Zi explained the dual character of the “Dao” operate as Being-Without-Form and Being-Within-Form, or Heaven and Earth, interrelated so closely the two sides of a coin. Yeats wanted to teach us what is the ultimate reality is and we can attain the “Unity of Being” at the moment of harmony of antinomies. The ultimate reality because neither one or many, concord nor discord, is symbolized as a phaseless sphere, but as all things fall into series of antinomies in human experience it becomes, the moment it is thought of, what he describe as the Thirteenth cone. Lao Zi insisted, “the world is oneness, or unity, emerging from the moment of the Dao.” Yeats also told us, “Eternity, though motionless itself, appears to be in motion.”