This paper examines the ways in which Yeats constructs and idealizes his Anglo-Irish Identity. After bitter disputes over Synge's plays he realized the insoluble opposition between the Irish Catholic and the Anglo-Irish, which meant his failure to unify Ireland through his Celtic Romanticism. He needed to make a new poetics to justify his predicament and to form a new identity. He creates, in his essays and poems, the identity and tradition of the Anglo-Irish from Burke through Swift, Goldsmith, Parnell to Synge and Yeats, the intellectuals who tried to enlighten the native Irish people only to fail and be isolated from them. According to Yeats, the reason the Anglo-Irish intellectuals had to meet the same fate in Ireland is due to the ignorance and sectarian hate of native Catholic Irish people. Although the Anglo-Irish always become victims, their defeat is considered by Yeats to be inescapable and even worthier than success in the reality where ignorance prevails. This is the discourse of tragic heroism. Yeats constructed the identity that is based on the dichotomy between the few Anglo-Irish and the Irish people, by which he attributes culture to the one, and nature to the other. Here culture is supposed to be superior to nature and that sense of superiority rests on the ability to culturalize nature. Yeats connected the culture with breeding which means being cultivated by discipline and education. In writing, it was through his poetics of mask, what he called “the sense of style,” that he could overcome his rage and hate to the mass and futhermore transform them to the higher virtues such as reason, manners and beauty. As the poems dealing with the Anglo-Irish big house and the Thoor Ballylee show, in their tradition what they have inherited is a heroic spirit of overcoming and transforming the adversity each generation has faced. Some critics have asserted Yeats shows de-mystifying recognition when he reveals his ancestors' illicit and unjust violence to the native Irish in the past. But we have to note that it finally leads to justifying his Anglo-Irish violence, for he thought it had been transformed by their overcoming spirit and efforts into order and culture whereas the violence of the Irish mass resulted into disorder and chaos. David Lloyd's opinion needs to be reconsidered in this regard. He praised Yeats's de-mystifying insights in some later poems and asserted, borrowing Paul de Man's terms, his writing is allegorical rather than symbolic. But in the poems he cited Yeats seems to be more interested in heroicizing and idealizing his Anglo-Irish identity and tradition. Yeats's Anglo-Irish identity should be understood as an response to the changed reality and is formed by his peculiar writing or representation.

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’s imagination is filled with the deliberate efforts and will to transform the given reality and self. Influenced by William Blake’s visionary or symbolic imagination who had pursued the eternal essence of life, Yeats sought for the perfect and beautiful as the goal which human beings should try to reach. In ‘Adam’s Curse,’ he asserts, since the Fall, there are nothing perfect and beautiful without one’s deliberate labour to reach them. A good poem necessarily needs lots of repeated correction, “stitching and unstitching,” but finally if it doesn’t seem natural like “a moment’s thought,” all the efforts and labour which have been made comes to be futile. In that the naturalness in poems through laborious process is emphasized, it can be said that his poetics would seek to the perfect and the refined, in content and expression, but most of all his great concern is on one’s passion and the laborious process to transform the reality as it is through imagination. This paper aims to explore the achievement of Yeats’s transformative imagination acted on the idealization of Anglo-Irish aristocratic tradition and nationality in terms of the discourse of nationalism. He projects onto Anglo-Irish aristocratic class the intellectual leadership over the crowd and the organic continuity and tradition which Irish middle class, that he hates, is regarded to lack. Under the threat and violence of Irish Catholics who began to make claims to their rights on dispossessed land, the Anglo-Irish, who had enjoyed the power and wealth since the 17th century, were forced to feel crisis. The Anglo-Irish were destined to play no more active roles in the following Irish history and would be in danger of isolation. Thus his idealization of the Anglo-Irish was constituted where his desire and fear meet. Here Yeats’s idealization of Anglo-Irish aristocrat was made retrospectively in the crisis. The Gregorys’ Coole House and Yeats’s tower, Thoor Ballylee are representative symbols in which he idealized the Anglo-Irish culture and its heroic tradition. The sense of form which Yeats found in the architectural form of Coole House as well as “courtesy” and “ceremony” in aristocrat’s life is one of the heroic ideals Yeats pursued throughout all his life. In poems dealing with this theme, we can see that he idealizes the Anglo-Irish culture and tradition by giving them the idealized heroic values such as the recklessness, intellect and courtesy, criticizing the rigid mind and snobbism of native middle class people who is indifferent to one’s spiritual value and imagination. This is the discourse of nationalism which insists on one’s nation’s innocent, continuous and self-sufficient attributes and proves its superiority to other nations. They would hide the fact that it is invented or constituted by purpose, assuming naturalness and making national myth a self-evident fact through various cultural discourses. But Yeats’s transformative imagination, as seen in ‘Adam’s Curse,’ puts great emphasis on one’s labour made behind to reach the ideal and the opposite to the reality, he lays bare his deliberate efforts of idealizing, not making natural by hiding and mystifying it. Here his poetry comes out of the typical discourse of nation. Like the Anglo-Irish ancestors who founded the magnificent house dreaming the ideal, Yeats himself who wrote a poem in the crisis of breakdown of the Anglo-Irish nationality by historical change and violence wanted to be memorized to his heir as a founder, “befitting the emblem of adversity.” In ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War,’ and ‘Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931,’ we can see that he makes the myth of Anglo-Irish nationality and at the same time demystifies or deconstructs it by showing that it is invented.