예술가와 그의 일생은 공적 영역에 속한다고 생각한다. 그래서 그의 일생은 역시 사려 깊개 다루어져야 한다. 이점에 있어 브랜다 매독스의 책 󰡔예이츠의 영혼: W.B. 예이츠의 내밀한 생활󰡕(뉴욕: 하퍼콜린사, 1999년)은 약간의 문제를 야기한다. 이 책은 그러나 예이츠학문에 기여하는 바가 상당히 큰 것 같다. 이 책은 한 예술가의 생활에서 비밀스러운 것을 알고자 하는 일반 독자들의 호기심을 자극하고 즐겁게 만들 일에도 집중하는 것 같다. 지난 수십 년 간은 일개인의 사생활에 대한 사람들의 태도변화가 있었고 어떤 것도 숨기지 않고 들추어낸다. 그렇지만 이 두 사람의 개인사를 이야기하면서 저자 메독스는 자신이 무엇에 대해 저술하고 있는 지, 더구나 이 두 사람의 이미지에 손상이 가는 것이 무엇일까에도 주의했어야 하지 않을까 생각한다. 조지 예이츠의 그림은 우스꽝스럽고, 예이츠의 그림은 더욱 그렇다. 반면에, 이 책의 장점을 지적한다면, 이 책을 천천히 읽으면, 색인이 보여주듯이 얻는 게 많을 것이다. 즉, 예이츠부부가 자동기술 때 등장하는 넋(컨트롤)의 이름이 모두 섬세하게 정리되어 있다. 그리고 예이츠가 관계를 맺었던 모든 여성들이 (이 책이 전기이기 때문에) 주의 깊게 색인으로 정리되어 있다. 그리고 색인에는 많은 시와 극 등 작품들이 정리되어 있는데 예이츠의 생애의 흐름에 따라 맥락으로 사용되고 있다.

예이츠의 초기 서정시는 문명과 이상화된 이미지들의 결합일 뿐만 아니 라 예이츠가 평생 동안 관심을 가졌던 아니마 문디 상징의 단초를 보여주고 있다. 특히 이 초기 시들에는 예이츠의 난해한 신비주의에 대한 관심과 함께 개인적인 관계를 가진 여성과 신화적인 여신을 상징하는 장미의 상징이 자주 등장하며, 이 장미는 시인으로서 의 개인적인 정서와 통합된 범인류적 기억인 세계령의 강력한 연결고리로 나타난다. 초 기 시에서부터 세계령은 예이츠의 작품에 창조적 구조이며 시적 영감인 뮤즈이다.

William Butler Yeats was born at Georgeville, Sandymount Avenue, Dublin, in 1865, and died in the South of France, in January 28, 1939. Yeats was fifty in 1915-1916. He provides a poetic rendering of his visionary experience at his fiftieth year in the fourth section of "Vacillation" written in November 1931, when he became absorbed in the philosophical thinking while writing A Vision: "My fiftieth year had come and gone,/ I sat, a solitary man,/ In a crowded London shop,/ An open book and empty cup/ On the marble table-top./ While on the shop and street I gazed/ My body of a sudden blazed;/ And twenty minutes more or less/ It seemed, so great my happiness,/ That I was blessed and could bless."(CPN 251). In May 9, 1917, recalling his fiftieth year, Yeats describes this experience in a prose, entitled "Anima Mundi": "Perhaps I am sitting in some crowded restaurant, the open book beside me, or closed, my excitement having overbrimmed the page. I look at the strangers near as if I had known them all my life, and it seems strange that I cannot speak to them: everything fills me with affection, I have no longer any fears of any needs; I do not even remember that this happy mood must come to an end. It seems as if the vehicle had suddenly grown pure and far extended and so luminous that the images from Anima Mundi, embodied there and drunk with that sweetness, would, like a country drunkard who has thrown a wisp into his own thatch, burn up time." (Myth 364-5) Seamus Heaney was born in April 13, 1939 in Count Derry, Northern Ireland, and has been attacking Yeats since 1980s for the latter's aristocratic mysticism and spiritual matters. Heaney gave a lecture at Oxford University in 1990, entitled "Joy or Night: Last Things in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats and Philip Larkin." This lecture was given at the end of his own fiftieth year and simultaneously commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of Yeats's death. In this lecture, Heaney comes to open up "a sudden comprehension" to Yeats's vacillating visionary experience of the spirit in "The Cold Heaven": "The spirit's vulnerability, the mind's awe at the infinite spaces and its bewilderment at the implacable inquisition which they representall of this is simultaneously present" (The Redress of Poetry 148). In "Fostering," a poem from Seeing Things (1991), Heaney professes his poetic admission of Yeatsian visionary position: "Me waiting until I was nearly fifty/ To credit marvels" (50). In short, Heaney reaches what Yeats did for the spiritual world. The main objective of this paper is to demonstrate how Heaney reacts Yeats's poetry of vision. My focus is on the year fifty, when they erupt their creative energy in terms of "vacillation"which nevertheless shows the provocative and violent dynamism of the Yeatsian "interlocking gyres."

In this study, I trace out the influence of woman’s images on Yeats in biographical and feministic point of view. For Yeats, woman was the major poetic motif and source of inspiration; meeting, interacting, and parting with women gave him a motive for poems and deepened philosophy as well as his literary view. As Yeats said in his Essays and Introductions, he "writes of his personal life, in his finest work out of its tragedy, whatever it be, remorse, lost love, or mere loneliness,” and "would die of loneliness but for women.” Indeed, woman for Yeats is the focal point of various themes such as praise of heroic and ideal beauty, despair caused by unrequited love, friendship, maternal love etc. Among many women who influenced Yeats, Maud Gonne was the most important figure. It seems that she was a real feminist who tried to seek a dignified life and ideal as a woman, cultivating her identity and soul rather than being a common woman who is financially and physically subject to man and to cultivate outward appearance to draw man's attention. Even though not accepting Yeats's love, she was not an extreme feminist who denied the entire role and realm of man and supported just woman's opinion and benefits. Instead she seemed to be a moderate feminist who tried to find the real freedom and hope for the Irish women and children who suffered from the dignity and violence of a patriarchal husband as well as chronic poverty. Yeats’s painful but productive relationship with Maud Gonne determined his favor for certain type of women with masculinity rather than with a passive, complaisant, and traditional beauty. As in his fascination of Niam suggested, Yeats liked to praise beautiful women who have masculinity, and he took a courtly love attitude to receive their love. Therefore, he tried to write poems which needed great labour like a woman’s childbirth and praise women of a masculine spirit. Yet Maud Gonne’s constant decline of his suit and radical political inclination, and his depressed Libido made him deeply feel the pain caused by such a mannish woman. Especially, the sudden confession of her past love with Millevoye and her marriage with MacBride gave him a great shock and changed his view of woman. Now he instead dreamed of living a comfortable life with a woman who has traditional feminine nature. At last, Yeats got married to Hyde-Lees with such feminine factors, only to find that her charm and sexual satisfaction didn’t last long. After the conflict with Maud Gonne in 1919, Yeats came to emphasize conservative view of woman, insisting that woman should live in a pure blessing and give up her opinionated mind. He asserted that woman with perfect beauty could be happy only when she made herself beautiful and played a faithful role as man’s supporter. In this period, Maud Gonne’s images was painted dark in his poems; ‘intellectual hatred’, ‘opinionated mind’, and ‘a woman who lost the Horn of Plenty’. But such dark images soon disappeared. Yeats again longed for his lost love, Maud Gonne. However he could not escape from the conflicts between body and soul, ideal and reality. Such a dilemma made him pay attention to Unity of Being, the harmonious union of body and soul, and create his persona, Crazy Jane. Yeats's views of woman suffer many changes through his earlier, middle and later poems. It can be said that his views of woman are expressed according to the increase or decrease in femininity or masculinity inherent within Yeats’s self, the influence of his suppressed libido, and his attitude toward Irish politics. However it can’t be denied that woman was the continuous motif and inspiration of his poems.

In reading Yeats’s works rooted in the ancient Irish tradition it will be helpful to understand celtic myth. Among extraordinary women from the ancient celtic tradition I studied three Irish women in W. B. Yeats's works: Queen Maeve in The Old Age in Queen Maeve, Deirdre in Deirdre, and Emer in The Only Jealousy of Emer. Moyra Caldecott’s Women in Celtic Myth provides much knowledge about Irish women characters. For the Irish stories the writer consulted Jeffrey Gantz’s Early Irish Myths and Sagas, Lady Gregory’s Cuchulain of Muirthemne and Gods and Fighting Men, and T. W. Roleston’s Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race. Maeve is the most written about among the Irish heroines: she is beautiful, forceful, strong, proud, devious, clever, lusty, and bloodthirsty. Daughter of Eochaid, the High King, she married a relatively minor king, Ailell, son of Ross Ruadh, king of Leinster. Their castle was on the plain of Magh Ai in the province of Connacht. Although Ailell was no weakling, he was, without a doubt, secondary to Maeve in many ways. She had property of her own: cattle, treasure and land that couldn’t match what he had. In fact the whole bloodbath of war to steal the Brown Bull of Cuailnge was brought about because there was one possession Ailell had that outshone her own: Ailell had a better bull. Maeve is the Queen most quoted as showing the privileged position of celtic women in the Iron Age. They were equal in every respect to men, and in some cases they were superior. They owned property; they could, as kings did, “divide gifts” and “give counsel”; they could ride chariots, fight battles, and dispose of lives. And with all this power and freedom went the recognition that women’s sexual needs were as legitimate as men’s. In The Old Age of Queen Maeve Yeats rehandling a given myth depends upon a combined knowledge of the myth that he learned and Yeats’s personal vision, sometimes even his personal affairs. Yeats’s love Maud Gonne is compared to Queen Maeve. A god of love, youth and poetry, Aengus who is crossed in love reminds us of the poet himself. In celtic myth there is a story of the love between Deirdre and Naoise: love with a lot of risks and sacrifices. This love is contrasted with the possessive and destructive lust of Conchubar. Then there is a theme of honor and dishonor. And finally there is beauty. Much is made of the extraordinary beauty of Deirdre, and it is a male reaction to her beauty that brings about “the sorrows.” In Deirdre Yeats selected certain elements which seem to be characteristic of the tale and dramatic in themselves, and introduced three wandering musicians, who are not in the myth. Deirdre was the Irish Helen, and Naisi her Paris, and Concobar her Menelaus. Yeats’s thematic structure provides the clearest link between the Irish myth and heroic romance. He wrote it in praise of the heroic woman, of “wild will”, and of passionate love and the powerful and joyous shattering of common codes and lives. Emer is the admirable wife of a great hero Cuchulain. She is beautiful, healthy, strong, intelligent, and vigorous. Her love for Cuchulain is the best of human love. In The Only Jealousy of Emer Yeats elevates Emer to the same tragic stature as Deirdre, the heroine of his Deirdre. Told by Bricriu that she must renounce her love for Cuchulain as the price for his return to life, Emer decides at the last moment to accept this bitter choice and return Cuchulain, ironically, to the arms of his mistress. These celtic women’s beauty may be representative not only of physical beauty but also the high aspirations of the soul. They are not virgins but mothers or wives. The heroic women show us that love makes humans mature. In these Plays Yeats turned to romantic dreaming, the tradition of nobility in the ancient celtic myths.