예이츠는 고대 영웅 쿠훌린과 현대 영웅 피어스와 코놀리를 아일랜드 영웅문화의 전형으로 제시했다. 그는 󰡔쿠훌린의 죽음󰡕이라는 극작품에 󰡔비전󰡕의 “과거의 삶에 대하여 꿈꾸기”와 가이어 이론으로 쿠훌린의 삶과 죽음, 사후세계를 구체적으로 재현했다. 쿠훌린은 피어스와 코놀리의 전형이었다. 이는 한 가이어의 정점에 해당하는 쿠훌린의 영웅문화가 끝나고, 그 정점에서 새로운 아일랜드 영웅인 피어스와 코놀리가 탄생한 것처럼 아일랜드 영웅문화가 지속적으로 순환하는 것이었다. 이 영웅문화의 순환은 개인의 영혼의 순환에도 동일하게 적용되는 윤회이었다. 그래서 예이츠는 쿠훌린의 삶과 죽음을 통해서 영웅문화뿐만 아니라 모든 인간의 삶도 지속적으로 변화하면서 순환한다는 점을 현대인들에게 강조하고 있다.

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.