Imagination is an important instrument in a poet’s creation. Imagination issometimes said to be derived from the longing and desire for the absent objects.Therefore the dynamic imagination, necessary for creating good poems, can be sustainedby the opposition and conflict between dualistic worlds such as the ideal and therealistic, eternity and time. But sometimes poets are tempted to be absorbed intoabstract imagination with which they can escape into supernatural world while ignoringthe real world. This abstract imagination can be called the limits of imagination.
This paper is aimed at studying how abstract imagination worked in W. B. Yeats’searly poems and what kind of poetic world he reached after overcoming the limits ofhis imagination. In his early poems, unrealistic and ideal perfection was sought as aresult of his self which was too weak and feeble to accept the painful world. As areflection of his weak self, unrealistic images distant from here and now, such aslegendary heroes, fairies and the eternal rose, were used in his early poems and createdan eternal world into which he could escape from the real. But as his self developedand changed into a more mature and harder state, he was able to accept and overcomethe despair and tragedy caused in his actual world. In his later period his selfdeveloped and intensified enough to accept even death as his natural destiny, and toremake himself and the world with his creative mind, with which he could overcomethe limits of imagination. Finally after overcoming the limits of his imagination, heattained a state of wisdom called ‘tragic gaiety’. Tragic gaiety is a kind of vision inwhich Yeats was able to embody eternity in the temporal world.