From Fantasy To Muse

Yeats, as the winner of Nobel Prize for literature, ranks among the greatest English poets in 20th century. He expressed Ireland spirit with poems which are full of inspiration and dedicate forms of art, and became another great poet with the processor of Shelly and Blake. It's commonly acknowledged that Yeats's achievement can be divided into three periods. In his early period, with the romantic tradition from Shelly and Blake, he related his poems to ancient Ireland ways, and this makes his early poem full of fantasy and myth. During this time, he met his lover and spirit companion for life, and pursuit her for many years, and she is Maud Gonne. Yeats also expressed his passion and emotion with the poems about Rose. Among these poems, Rose not only represents Gonne, but also is the symbol of beauty, divinity, purity, light and all the positive things. "Eternal Beauty" also becomes an important theme in his poems. When he came to his middle period, due to the disappointment of love and politics, he put forwards his doctrine of Mask, and expressed his emotion with simpler but clearer words and accurate symbols. In his later period, engaged with wife's automatic writing and their common interest in mystery, the muse for the transnatural power has become the inspiration for Yeats. The famous poems in this time include Leda and Swan, The Second Coming and Sailing to Brazantine. We can easily find the poet's rethinking and exploration for history, life and divinity here.Although domestically there are few researches for Yeats, it is fruitful in aboard. In the second chapter of this article, we have a literature review for the research of Yeats, and discussed deconstructivism, which is the theoretical foundation for this paper, in detail. Deconstructivism appeared firstly in French 1960s, and spread across the world soon. There are famous Deconstructionists not only in French, like Derrida, de.Man, but also in America, like "the four of gang" in Yale school, they devoted themselves to the research of deconstruction. Deconstructivism focus on the break of the traditional explanation, and the subversion for the logocentrism especially in structuralism. Through the free explanation for the text, Deconstructionists try to find the paradoxical meaning in text itself, and make the absurdity emerged. Then the old theme of works could be subverted. Although there are a lots of opposite words for deconstructivism in world wide, like the lack of practical ability and seriousness, hard to understand, and even Bloom called it as "school of resentment" in his later work The Western Canon, we can not negate the great influence and theoretical value of deconstruction. This article, with the representative works of Yeats's each period, try to find the paradoxical and contradictory meanings and symbols through the deconstructive analysis, to achieve the subversion of the traditional meaning and to explore the thoughts in the depth of poet's heart. Like the analysis in the chapter three, the poem The Stolen Child no longer shows the conflict between mortal world and fantastic world, but an overlap of the mortal world the disordered paradise. And Rose, no longer is the representation of purity and divinity, but a divinity without direction, without end. And in chapter four, we discussed Yeats's "doctrine of the mask", and have an analysis for Easter 1916 to found the history in mask, the hero in mask, and the author in mask. In chapter five, we mainly discussed the imagery of swan in Leda and the Swan, which is a representative work of Yeats's later period, and related it to the swan in The Wild Swans at Coole. Through the exploration and subversion, the swan, as an avatar of Zeus, the God, stands in front of us with a kind of violent divinity. It's mystery, powerful and full of wisdom, but also brutal and chaotic. And this should be parts of Yeats's later esoteric thoughts.