W. B. Yeats’s Poetics Of Antinomy

This dissertation is an attempt to give a comprehensive survey of William Butler Yeats’s life and works in the mode of a critical biography, focusing on his doctrine of the Mask and the occult system outlined in his A Vison. By drawing a comparison between Wilde’s theory of the mask with that of Yeats’s and drawing on Nietzsche’s aesthetic doctrine concerning Apollinian and Dionysian energies, this dissertation sheds new lights on the implications and significance of Yeats’s theory of the Mask. The dissertation tries to state that, as a representative work of Yeats’s poetics of antinomy, Yeats’s occult masterpiece A Vision can be basically deemed as a complex symbolic system. By drawing on Nietzsche’s doctrine about tragedy, the dissertation analyzes Yeats’s tragic antinomies of A Vision, claiming that it is Yeats’s double vision that enables him to embody truth while transcending his personal tragic existence.Writing in the wake of the great19th century Romantics, Yeats is constantly reshaping and readapting himself to the changing social and political realities in contemporary Ireland. Bent on forging the spirit of Ireland in the smithy of his soul, Yeats is continuously pounding the particular in himself until all is bound in a perfect unity. Yeats believes that all things are experienced as antinomy, division and conflict. Man has to find his anti-self in order to complete himself. What follows from the perpetual struggles between man and fate is the perfection of life expressed through the whole of his works. Yeats’s dualism and his cyclical pattern of history manifest his deterministic tendency. The occult metaphysical system in A Vision functions as a frame of reference for his art, helping him to hold in a single thought reality and justice. Although what it provides is a tragic vision, A Vision seen as a whole repels and allures as a series of metaphorical statements about poetry. It provides a means of producing art that engages with history without the moralizing or mimesis that this might seem to require. Chapter1outlines the literature review of Yeats studies in the West and in China and the purpose and significance of this study. Chapter2deals with Yeats’s relationship with the milieu. Chapter3delves into Yeats’s divided consciousness, his dualism and his perpetual self-renewal as unifying principle. Chapter4elaborates Yeat’s doctrine of the Mask and its implications and significance. Chapter5approaches Yeats’s A Vision from the perspective of tragic antinomies. Chapter6offers a summary of the theme of this dissertation.