The Imagination Of Ireland

Imagination is the core of Yeats' poetic theory as well as his spiritual world.However,his maintenance of the imagined world is based on the complicated counterbalancing of the actual world.Meanwhile,the development of Yeats' poetic thinking,as a historical process,is both changing,for him,and established,for us.There exists thus a deep inner relation between what is changeable and what is established,which forms the foundation for Yeats' aesthetic thinking.In order to explore into Yeats' poetic wisdom,as a result,this dissertation tries a special and perhaps not profitless angle,i.e.,to trace the tensional imagination-realism relationship that exists in Yeats' life,to reveal the inner relation between what is possible and what is settled.While doing this,we pay special attention to a detailed analysis of his poetry,to combine his poetic thinking with his poetic practice for a better understanding of the imagination,or the above mentioned core,of his poetic theory.This dissertation traces Yeats hesitation between the surreal world and the corporeal world,analyzing their different effects on his mind and poetry at all his three writing stages.Yeats went through three writing stages and,in the first one,he was influenced by such ideas that emphasize imagination as early romanticism and occultism and built his own aesthetic thinking that was full of imagination.He painted the fairyland of the Celtic fairy tales as the symbol of the imagined world and tried to cover the real world with it.Besides,he eulogized an idealistic,fairy-like Irish people,hoping to guide modern Irishmen with them to prove Ireland's independent identity.In the second stage,Irish independence movement was full of blood and violence,which made the real world rather powerful to overtop the world of imagination.To cope with this new situation,Yeats used the mask theory but also managed to run away from reality secretly by means of occultism and the idea of the "terrible beauty".Thus,Yeats' announced in a secret way his choice between the two worlds.In the final stage,Ireland achieved independence and political conflicts faded,which gave Yeats a chance to review the relationship between the world of imagination and the world of reality.With the changes in his poetic heroes,he showed his movement from the surreal world to the realistic one and to the surreal one again.His idea of an ever-recurring history also revealed a new definition of the surreal-real relation.Eventually,Yeats arrived at a tolerant,compassionate and matured return to the world of imagination basing on a confirmation of human power and sympathy towards life's sufferings.The actual world,while counterbalancing the imagined world,illuminated and enriched the latter and helped Yeats' poetry to move towards a full,magnificent and splendid style.