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ISSN : 1226-4946(Print)
ISSN : 2288-5412(Online)
The Yeats Journal of Korea Vol.9 pp.57-81
DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.14354/yjk.1998.9.57

The Poetic Self in the Process of Self-Meditation: Yeats’s Last Poems

Young Ja Choe

Abstract

Though all of the poems including Yeats’s Last Poems were writtenduring the last years of his life, the remarkable vigor of thought and ofimagination, which increased with the poets’ years, is shown here oncemore. However, compared with the powerful impact of The Tower and TheWinding Stair, the accent of their nonchalant freedom and more colloquialstyle was one principal source of the reviewers’ dissatisfaction. And T. R.Henn suggested that we should perceive the philosophical and satiricalimplications behind so many seemingly personal poems, even in the accentof lust and rage of the Last Poems.
The primary concern of philosophy is the problem of the self, while thephilosophical implication of Last Poems is the self itself. Yeats’s final aimin writing poetry is the perfection of the life and of the work in theprocess of creating the true self. In his last letter he said, “man canembody truth but he cannot know it, but he must embody it in thecompletion of his life.” In this sense, the life itself is the total work of art,the completed symbol. When he elucidated that he would write a poem“cold and passionate as dawn,” the pregnant word “dawn” is to be thecompleted symbol of the work of art. This passage concerns thosetransformations which are endemic to art. The prime idea must be thatnecessary infusion of joy in the most tragic contents - the incoherence ofthe actual life and the limitation of human life.
It is the poetics of his itself which achieves “the dawn,” the twilightzone of the darkness of night and the light of day. Yeats found that hisplace could be the trysting-place of the extremity of sorrow and theextremity of joy, the perfection of personality, and the perfection of self-surrender, passion, and stillness. “Lapis Lazuli’s” “Black out: Heavenblazing into the head” means that the dark grow luminous while the voidfruitful. Yeats wrote, “when I understand I am nothing and nobody”through the state of darkness, . . . there must be the dance at thetrysting-place or at ‘the clearing’ Heidegger might coin, in the mingling ofthe contraries. The nobleness of art exists in playing together thecontraries. Where all the contraries can play together, the dawn will break.As Yeats can embody the truth, his form of self-conquest should beachieved through the self-surrender and the transformation endemic to art.
Keywords :

시적 자아의 자기성찰 과정: 예이츠의 『최후 시편들』(1)

최영자
한국외국어대학교

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