Most of Yeats’s works are composed of antitheses which are defined by theirrhetoric, form, tone and thematic motifs. If the antitheses are Yeats’s central meansof perceiving and interpreting the world, what kinds of experience are posited at thecenter of his life, and in what way and manner are his conceptions of “unity ofbeing” and “unity of culture” connected with his experience of “tragic joy”? Thisessay attempts to approach the basic frame of Yeats's mind which perceives andinterprets the world as composed of contraries, antinomies and antitheses. In suchcontext, Yeats's idea and experience of tragedy are shown to be constructedideologically in the situation that is divided by the two classes, namely thedeclining Anglo-Irish Protestant and the powerfully ascending Catholic middleclasses.
Yeats’s conception and experience of tragedy are connected with what MichelFoucault calls “the absolute power of death”. Yeats thinks that if the modern poetcould enact the poetic authority, he should be able to embody the ancient forms ofpower. Hence his ideology of tragedy and authority which leads him to enact theoral tradition of ancient magical arts. Yeats thinks that, through the poetic mode ofancient magical arts, modern lyric poet can enact the absolute power of death,breaking the comedic power of modern individualism. Yeats's ideology of tragedyand authority, however, is in constant contradiction with “the life-administeringpower” of modern world. In spite of his desire to enact the tragic power of ancientbard, the space of his later lyrics remains the complex site of ideological conflicts between the residual forms of traditional Anglo-Irish culture and the dominantcultural forms of modern individualism. (The second part of this essay will becontinued in the next issue)