이 논문은 필자가 편집하고 해설을 한 저서 『W. B. 예이츠의 시』(런던: J. M. 덴트 & 선, 1990)(xvi-li쪽)를 『한국예이츠저널』41호(2013년 여름)에 전재한 것이다. 저자 대니엘 올브라트와 그의 출판사 오리온 출판 그룹의 전재허락에 대해 감사드린다

『율리시즈』속에 예이츠가 직접 등장하지 않지만, 그의 존재가 작품과 문맥 속에서 느껴진다. 예이츠의 『여자백작 캐스린』과 『훌리한의 딸 캐스린』은 스티븐의 돌아가신 어머니와 관련해서 그의 정신에 큰 영향을 끼친다. 그리고 모드 곤의 죽은 아들에 대한 집착은 몰리에게서도 나타난다. 역사적으로, 불름이 연관된 것으로 알려진 친 보어 운동은 모드 곤이 결성한 것이었다. 그리고 불름의 우유부단함은 예이츠의 이 운동에 대한 객관적이고 냉정한 태도와도 비교된다. 비록 예이츠의 아버지 같은 태도가 부담스러웠지만, 『율리시즈』의 3명의 주인공을 만드는데 예이츠의 영향이 크다.

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

The relationship between Yeats and Gonne seems to show an example of the traditional courtly love. Courtly love was a medieval Europe conception of nobly and chivalrously expressing love and admiration. Under this relationship, although a male expresses the devotional love to a female, a woman shows no love and pity for a man and a woman is an object who uplifts a man's spirit. This relationship may be said to show the man's fear of castration. The relationship between Yeats and Gonne starts by his admiration for her beauty and sternness as a nationalist for the Irish Independence. Also, he glorifies her as a secret being. Moreover, Yeats's love for her shows the doubleness: erotic and spiritual, humane and transcendental, and humiliating and proud. However, Gonne's coldness leads Yeats to desperation. And the last step shows Yeats's fear of castration for the politically-minded Maud Gonne. In Rose, there is Yeats's admiration for the secret woman, Maud Gonne. Yeats's unrequited love leads finally to desperation and sorrow for love, facing Gonne‘s unwavering coldness as a nationalist, which leads Yeats to give her up, showing a kind of fear of castration.

This paper is an attempt to read “Easter 1916,” one of W. B. Yeats's best-known political poems, in terms of its representation of women and the related politics of sexuality. In the second stanza of the poem where the poet describes four rebels of the Easter Rising, he shows Countess Constance Markievicz. the woman whom Yeats knew so well from his childhood in Sligo. Besides her, the writer of this paper proposes the possibility of reading other two woman images in the poem: Maud Gonne and Cathleen ni Houlihan. By discussing these described or suggested images of women, this paper tries to show that they represent the "terrible beauty" which the poet says the rebels of the Easter Rising have generated.The first woman this paper chooses for discussion is Countess Markievicz. The poet describes her mainly as a woman whose "voice grew shrill" because of her spending "nights in argument," and then compares her present shrill voice with the "sweet" voice she had when she was "young and beautiful." In order to understand the intent of the poet's emphasis on Countess Markievicz's "shrill" voice, the present writer reads one passage from Yeats's journal, where he regards "the shrillness" of voices of "the political class in Ireland" as the result of "the cultivation of hatred as one energy of their movement." In another similar passage, Yeats relates this hatred to "the sexual abstinence, so common among young men and women in Ireland." Based on this reading of Yeats's prose passages, this paper concludes that Countess Markievicz's shrill voice reveals her hatred and her negative attitude to sexual matters. The next part of the paper deals with two women characters, Maud Gonne and Cathleen ni Houlihan. Although she does not appear in the poem, Maud Gonne is suggested in the poem by her similarity to Countess Markievicz and by the poet's mentioning of her husband John MacBride. To support the presence and importance of Maud Gonne in the poem, the writer of this paper briefly reads two poems of Yeats--"A Prayer for My Daughter" and "Among School Children"--where he describes her in a very similar way to the description of Countess Markievicz in "Easter 1916." Another woman, Cathleen ni Houlihan, is also suggested in the poem, because, in terms of symbolic images, she seems to have led the rebels to the battlefield of the rising. This paper reads Yeats's play Cathleen ni Houlihan to show that she also can be understood in this poem in a negative way: she symbolizes the hatred and its resultant sexual abstinence of the rebels. In this way, like Countess Markievicz and Maud Gonne, she can represent the "terrible beauty" of the Easter Rising. Lastly, this paper considers another image of woman which appears in the last and fourth stanza, where the poet ends the poem by naming the rebels "As a mother names her child / Where sleep at last has come / On limbs that had run wild." The writer of the paper thinks that the poet needs this image of mother to mitigate his critique of the rebels which he has done in the third stanza, especially by using the image of stone. By becoming a real mother himself, unlike another "terrible" mother of Ireland, Cathleen ni Houlihan, the poet can arrive at a reconciled and balanced position, and accept the rebels in their contradictory and tragic state.

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

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.

In this study, I trace out the influence of woman’s images on Yeats in biographical and feministic point of view. For Yeats, woman was the major poetic motif and source of inspiration; meeting, interacting, and parting with women gave him a motive for poems and deepened philosophy as well as his literary view. As Yeats said in his Essays and Introductions, he "writes of his personal life, in his finest work out of its tragedy, whatever it be, remorse, lost love, or mere loneliness,” and "would die of loneliness but for women.” Indeed, woman for Yeats is the focal point of various themes such as praise of heroic and ideal beauty, despair caused by unrequited love, friendship, maternal love etc. Among many women who influenced Yeats, Maud Gonne was the most important figure. It seems that she was a real feminist who tried to seek a dignified life and ideal as a woman, cultivating her identity and soul rather than being a common woman who is financially and physically subject to man and to cultivate outward appearance to draw man's attention. Even though not accepting Yeats's love, she was not an extreme feminist who denied the entire role and realm of man and supported just woman's opinion and benefits. Instead she seemed to be a moderate feminist who tried to find the real freedom and hope for the Irish women and children who suffered from the dignity and violence of a patriarchal husband as well as chronic poverty. Yeats’s painful but productive relationship with Maud Gonne determined his favor for certain type of women with masculinity rather than with a passive, complaisant, and traditional beauty. As in his fascination of Niam suggested, Yeats liked to praise beautiful women who have masculinity, and he took a courtly love attitude to receive their love. Therefore, he tried to write poems which needed great labour like a woman’s childbirth and praise women of a masculine spirit. Yet Maud Gonne’s constant decline of his suit and radical political inclination, and his depressed Libido made him deeply feel the pain caused by such a mannish woman. Especially, the sudden confession of her past love with Millevoye and her marriage with MacBride gave him a great shock and changed his view of woman. Now he instead dreamed of living a comfortable life with a woman who has traditional feminine nature. At last, Yeats got married to Hyde-Lees with such feminine factors, only to find that her charm and sexual satisfaction didn’t last long. After the conflict with Maud Gonne in 1919, Yeats came to emphasize conservative view of woman, insisting that woman should live in a pure blessing and give up her opinionated mind. He asserted that woman with perfect beauty could be happy only when she made herself beautiful and played a faithful role as man’s supporter. In this period, Maud Gonne’s images was painted dark in his poems; ‘intellectual hatred’, ‘opinionated mind’, and ‘a woman who lost the Horn of Plenty’. But such dark images soon disappeared. Yeats again longed for his lost love, Maud Gonne. However he could not escape from the conflicts between body and soul, ideal and reality. Such a dilemma made him pay attention to Unity of Being, the harmonious union of body and soul, and create his persona, Crazy Jane. Yeats's views of woman suffer many changes through his earlier, middle and later poems. It can be said that his views of woman are expressed according to the increase or decrease in femininity or masculinity inherent within Yeats’s self, the influence of his suppressed libido, and his attitude toward Irish politics. However it can’t be denied that woman was the continuous motif and inspiration of his poems.

It is well known that Yeats loved Maud Gonne all through his life. Even after she married John MacBride and he married George Hyde Lees, he couldn’t stop loving her. He proposed to her many times not only before she married but also after she became a widow. But she didn’t accept his courtship, saying that platonic love could make their love everlasting. She even said that the poems were their children for she made them possible by “sowing the unrest & storm.” This kind of love and/or friendship made Yeats write lots of poems about her and his longing for her love. The poems about her began to be written in his early youth in The Rose. After that many poems were written on and off through his long poetic career to Last Poems. The poems about her are more than fifty or so. The poems portrayed her as an ideal beauty like Helen and/or as a goddess of love and beauty like Aphrodite. Sometimes he complained her not accepting his courtship. At times he blamed her for engaging in the political movement of Ireland’s independence too deep. From time to time he lamented her marrying a “drunken, vainglorious lout.” But he loved “the pilgrim soul” in her all through his life. Though Yeats complained and blamed and lamented Maud Gonne’s human aspect, he idealized her divine aspect in his poems. He idealized her as a Rose, Helen of Troy and/or Aphrodite. That was the best way to keep her beauty everlasting. Though she suffered many human difficulties, she was an ideal beauty to Yeats to the end.

Based on the assumption that Maud Gonne was one of the most important persons in Yeats’s life and art, this paper is an attempt to understand the “labyrinthine” nature of their complex relationship. However, the present writer is not trying to dig into their lives for the specific facts which might be used to support his argument; rather, he is trying to read some of Yeats’s poems in such a way to illuminate his relation to Gonne. That is, through the close reading of related poems, the present writer examines how Gonne is thematically and formally represented in Yeats’s poems, how the representations change through the years of his life, and how they are related to other aspects of his poetry. The first introductory part of this paper very briefly surveys the life of Gonne, how her relationship with Yeats began and continued, and how she influenced him in writing his poems. Although it is true that she brought into his life “an overpowering tumult,” it is also true that between fifty and sixty of Yeats’s poems were created in the wake of their relationship. The main part of the paper analyzes Yeats’s poems chosen from his early, middle and late period of life. Some poems, such as “The Sorrow of Love,” “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven,” “Adam’s Curse,” “No Second Troy,” “The Cold Heaven,” “A Prayer for my Daughter,” “Among School Children” are more closely and thoroughly read than others. In reading the poems, this paper tries to show how the poet’s representations of Gonne in the poems reveal not only the actual situations of their relationship at the moment of their writing but also the aesthetic and political ideologies of the poet himself at that moment.