In this paper, through appreciating one of W. B. Yeats’s later poems, I try tofind how the poet’s creative self gets to have its creative power and in whatmechanism it expands its poetic circumference. “Among School Children” is thevery poem his poetic self and creative imagination are well wrought into. In thepoem, the poet suggests that power and knowledge cannot exist together, speakingof the powerful theories of Plato and simultaneously of the philosopher’spowerless being before Nature. He praises Aristotle as a king of kings, andPythagoras as world-famous golden-thighed, but he mocks them of being oldclothes upon an old stick to scare a bird. In the same way, he asserts that “thebody is not bruised to pleasure soul.” In the sense of deconstructionists, all thebinary oppositions have their hierarchies; however, Yeats puts the two antitheticalelements on the identical level, as they are not subordinated to each other, andtries to bridge the abyss or space between.
Such an attempt to unite the opposite worlds is manifested in his A Vision.Concerning his “gyre” theory, the figure is frequently drawn as a double cone.The one is called primary gyre, representing space, intellect, mask and fortune;the other antithetical one to represent time, emotion, creativity and will. Thenarrow end of each cone is in the centre of the broad end of the other. Seen atthe narrow end of each cone through the centre of each broad end, appears acircle having a dot at the center. This is the poet’s world of imagination whosecentre is his “self” and whose circumference is the limit of the self’s perception.The poet’s life-long activities are related with his efforts to expand thecircumference. “Among School Children” is a trace of such activities. The centreis the place where the self of the poet is located; the circumference is where theself “perceives its limitation,” or where arises the feeling of awe, terror, orecstasy, which means a kind of tension geared between the binary oppositeworlds: the finite and the infinite; the mortal and the immortal; life and death;the real and the ideal; youth and age; the body and soul; pleasure and despair.
The perception network of the poet connects the centre and circumference.The power to widen the circle originates from the poet’s paradoxical sense of life,of deprivation, and of renunciation through an attainable love with Maud Gonne,tensions between religious struggles, civil revolutions, and so on. The sharpconfrontation of these tensions takes place rise to in the circumference andstimulates the poet’s creative imagination. This power of self strengthened by thesetensions starts its quest-journey to explore the mysteries beyond the limit of itscircle: the mysteries of the opposite worlds separated here and there. The ultimatepurpose of the journey, finally, is to reach the united condition of the twoworlds, which means what Greg Johnson calls “the highest imaginativeenhancement of human identity” or immortality. This united world is the placewhere “we cannot know the dancer from the dance” and where Yeats’s “unity ofbeing” is synthesized.