이 논문은 인도출신 작가들과의 교류를 연구하여 인도철학과 문학이 예이츠에 미친 영향을 다룬다. 인도철학에 관한 예이츠의 생각은 모히니 차터지, 슈리 푸로힛트 스와미, 라빈드라나스 타고르, 등 3명의 인도 사람들과의 관계를 보면 알 수 있는데, 그의 『자서전』을 포함하여 그의 많은 작품에 잘 드러나 있는 것처럼 그의 자아의 형성에 기여한다. 예이츠의 『환상록』은 인도의 신지론자 모히니 차터지의 영향하에 그의 인도철학의 수용을 아주 잘 보여주는데, 『자서전』에서 어떻게 예이츠가 그를 처음 그와 인도철학을 접하게 되는지 이야기한다. 『지탄잘리』 서문에서 예이츠는 라빈드라나스 타고르의 벤갈어 시의 산문번역은 수년간 어느 것 못지않게 그의 피를 끓게 했다고 말한다. ｢아나슈야와 바자야｣, ｢인도사람의 신에 대한 생각｣, ｢인도인의 사랑에 대해｣, ｢메루｣ 같은 예이츠의 시들은 인도지식의 체계의 영향을 보여주며, 그의 산문의 상당부분의 이면에도 인도철학의 강한 영향을 보여준다.

번 연구의 주된 목적은 예이츠와 엘리엇의 시적 자아가 추구하는 최종 목적(방향)을 찾아보는 것이다. 그 목적에서의 차이를 발견함으로써 시적 자아의 이상향을 찾을 수 있다는 것이 본 연구의 장점이다. 그 결과 예이츠는 시적 자아의 “개인적 해방”을 추구하는가 하면 엘리엇의 경우 “자아비우기”를 통해 절대자 수용을 강조 한다는 점을 알 수 있었다.

The paper is to study the poetic self in Yeats’s later poetry. Yeats dramatizes internal conflicts of the self fighting with the other self. He has not created a single unified image of character in his poetry. He has tried to consciously express the polarity of the self by projecting dual characteristics of being through the poetic self. The poetic self in his poetry is the self who is transformed and developed through the conflict accepting the reality of human nature. Looking over the whole of human life and its prevailing desolation, the poetic self tries to find the proper response to life and suffering in terms of “tragic joy.” The poetic self created by Yeats has got around the conflict through a positive response to life in all its tragic aspects.

Yeats remarked, two years before his death, that it is the poets’ first business to describe desirable persons, desirable places, and states of mind. One of theses excellent persons and places in Last Poems―ascetics and the “half-way house” the Chinamen of “Lapis Lazuli” climb towards. Here we notice how many topographical associations lay everywhere: “the mountain,” “Alt” and the central character climbing some high point. Having lifted himself to the vantage point of age, Yeats is able to form a final altitude. The last poems are mainly set in the location of the open field, that dominates the poetic landscape. ‘The whole system’ of A Vision ‘is founded upon the belief that ultimate realit y…falls in human consciousness into a series of antinomies.’ Since he had long arranged his thought and disciplined his imagination by ideas of antithesis, it is natural that his later work should play out an extended series of oppositions: knowledge and ignorance; day and night; time and eternity. In the process of consciousness they have a tendency to be separated from each other into various sets of the opposite; while their attendant logic characterizes a struggle towards harmony. ‘Logical and emotional conflicts alike lead towards a reality which is concrete, sensuous and bodily.’ “Meru” invokes an image of human being in conflict with the cyclicity of a cosmic rhythm. Yeats, identified with the oriental hermits in the ascetic attitude to life, sees “the naked bodies” to awake to the realities of life, he is reassured that the higher perception should be gained through their sensuous experiences in the darkness of night. According to St. John of Cross, ‘the nature of the soul requires complete renunciation of the world.’ The darkness brings wisdom, emptiness sight. Yeats would describe it as ‘the luminous dark.’ This implies in ‘via negativa’ that one is nothing, paradoxically, to become everything. The open region for everything is the place Heidegger called ‘clairiēre,’ which Yeats would like to paint in his poetry. Its openness let brightness play with darkness in it. The relation to light and darkness characterizes as ‘a double’ like the dawn image. This curious relation Adams claims to name ‘identity.’ Identity has the same form, as does a metaphorical trope, where sameness and difference coexist in language. He would write a poem ‘cold and passionate as the dawn.’ The important metaphor, which Yeats uses to describe the intersection of the two worlds, is that of dawn. In this paper I was concerned with both the realm where religion, art, personal consciousness converge and the place in which gathers and protects everything. Yeats was life long a man who practiced both absolute integrity of craft and perfection of personality, the perfection of its surrender. I take poetry to be an exploration of human consciousness, where it faces time and eternity in their play. Equally it is an exploration of words.

Though all of the poems including Yeats’s Last Poems were written during the last years of his life, the remarkable vigor of thought and of imagination, which increased with the poets’ years, is shown here once more. However, compared with the powerful impact of The Tower and The Winding Stair, the accent of their nonchalant freedom and more colloquial style was one principal source of the reviewers’ dissatisfaction. And T. R. Henn suggested that we should perceive the philosophical and satirical implications behind so many seemingly personal poems, even in the accent of lust and rage of the Last Poems. The primary concern of philosophy is the problem of the self, while the philosophical implication of Last Poems is the self itself. Yeats’s final aim in writing poetry is the perfection of the life and of the work in the process of creating the true self. In his last letter he said, “man can embody truth but he cannot know it, but he must embody it in the completion of his life.” In this sense, the life itself is the total work of art, the completed symbol. When he elucidated that he would write a poem “cold and passionate as dawn,” the pregnant word “dawn” is to be the completed symbol of the work of art. This passage concerns those transformations which are endemic to art. The prime idea must be that necessary infusion of joy in the most tragic contents - the incoherence of the actual life and the limitation of human life. It is the poetics of his itself which achieves “the dawn,” the twilight zone of the darkness of night and the light of day. Yeats found that his place could be the trysting-place of the extremity of sorrow and the extremity of joy, the perfection of personality, and the perfection of self-surrender, passion, and stillness. “Lapis Lazuli’s” “Black out: Heaven blazing into the head” means that the dark grow luminous while the void fruitful. Yeats wrote, “when I understand I am nothing and nobody” through the state of darkness, . . . there must be the dance at the trysting-place or at ‘the clearing’ Heidegger might coin, in the mingling of the contraries. The nobleness of art exists in playing together the contraries. Where all the contraries can play together, the dawn will break. As Yeats can embody the truth, his form of self-conquest should be achieved through the self-surrender and the transformation endemic to art.