“All noble things are the result of warfare; great nations and classes, of warfare in the visible world, great poetry and philosophy, of invisible warfare, the division of mind within itself" said Yeats. Warfares between thesis and antithesis, whether visible or invisible, lie at the heart of Yeats's poetic world, enabling the poet to create the enormously powerful poetic text. In “Meditations in Time of Civil War”, both visible and invisible warfares are overlapped each other, intensifying the division of the poet's own mind, revealing the bitter agony of the poetic self to criticize and remake itself. This poem dramatizes a story of the poet's self-criticism and self-recreation through the warfare between History, the Irish Civil War, and the poet's dream as a cultural nationalist to re-establish and preserve the Irish identity. In “Ancestral Houses”, the poet dreams to redeem the eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish aristocratic ideals for making the unitary Irish mind, only to realize its impossibility. In “My House" through “My Descendants”, the poet seeks to re-establish the Irish identity in his own sanctuary, Thoor Ballylee, through the poetic task to break “the symbolic rose" into flower, only to fail in it, for he has excluded and suppressed History, the Irish Civil War, from his mind. The poet's dream is broken up. In “The Road at My Door" and “The Stare's Nest by My Window", the poet encounters the Civil War face to face, struggling to transform its violence and bitterness into ‘sweetness' and pursuing his dream once more, but it's far from being realized. In “I see Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart's Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness", the poet internalizes the violent and bitter Irish historical realities through his vigorous imagination, severely criticizing himself as a solitary Platonist and remaking his poetic self a more solid one. In “The Tower", written next to this poem, we can meet the enormous power of his recreated poetic self.

W. B. Yeats began to write his works when Ireland was struggling for its independence from England. Young Yeats hoped to be a national poet and was naturally concerned about the future of his fatherland. The way Yeats chose for his country was a cultural one, not a military or political one. He believed in the Irish people’s artistic sensibilities and believed that his country could be a healthier and better country than England through the ’Unity of Culture’. Yeats was attracted to drama because of its usefulness as a public art. He wanted to establish a national drama based on Irish folklore and myth. He believed that drama could achieve or revive the ’Unity of Culture’ which he equated with the national unity of Ireland. Yeats’s main idea was that to achieve ’Unity of Culture’, the support of common people for art would be essential. Yeats’s early play, The King’s Threshold shows the unity of the poet and common people well. The story is based on an Irish myth. The king, a man of action, banishes Seanchan the poet, a man of words, from his court (affairs of state) and the poet choose to die on a hunger-strike for his rights in the court, that is, for the value of art in society. The poet works for the common people and expects their support, of which the king is much afraid. The King’s Threshold dramatizes the theme that concerned Yeats so deeply, the role of art in society. And another main point of the play is that poetry transcends politics. Yeats satirizes the defects and deficiencies of a society which no longer recognizes the artist’s role. But the poet dies, and we are not shown any effect that his death may have had on either society or the individual. The modern Irish people were not what the young poet had expected. Though the young poet’s dream for the ’Unity of Culture’ may be naive, the play shows us Yeats’s view of art and his belief in the poet’s role in society.