이 글은 예이츠가『캐슬린 니 훌리한』에서 아일랜드의 통렬한 역사를 극작품의 형식으로 재현하여 아일랜드의 독립과 자유를 얼마나 열망했는지를 분석한다. 필자는『캐슬린 니 훌리한』이 아일랜드의 정치적 사건을 다룬 정치극이 아닌 역사극이라고 주장한다. 이는 그가 관객들에게 아일랜드의 역사적 뿌리의 근원은 어디이며, 과거에 아일랜드의 왕들과 민중들이 아일랜드를 지키기 위하여 그들의 귀중한 생명을 얼마나 많이 희생시켰는지를 인식하도록 만들어 미래의 아일랜드의 모습을 구체적으로 그려보도록 만들기 때문이다. 그래서 이 극작품은 이 시기 이후에 창작된 극작품과 시들에서 아일랜드의 역사적 인물들과 장소들 작품의 배경이나 상징적 인물로 전환되는 새로운 길을 열어주는 주춧돌이 된다.

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.