An Analysis Of The Female Images And Motif Of Pursuit In Yeats' Poems

William Butler Yeats, winner of Nobel Prize for literature in 1923, is the leading poet in English poetry of the 20th century. He is the founder of Abbey Theater of Ireland and the major playwright who wrote plays for it. Yeats worked diligently and made important innovations in poetic writing. He accomplished great achievements in fields like Romanticism, Aestheticism, Symbolism, Realism and Modernism, etc. Yeats' poetic style is changeable, turning from Romanticism in the early period, to Realism and Modernism in the middle period, to the mixture of symbolism and metaphysics in the last period. Being influenced by studies of Occultism, metaphysics and Indian religion, Yeats explored symbolism and investigated origin and nature of the world in his last period of poetic creation. Mask theory and gyre theory are considered Yeats' most typical philosophical achievement. Yeats has always been considered the representative of Irish poetry and drama, who makes great contributions to Irish Drama Revival in 20th century.In studies of Yeats' poetry at home and abroad, those on female images in Yeats' poetry have not been really touched sufficiently. People always think Yeats' female images in his poems are under the influence of his beloved beautiful Irish actress Maud Gonne. Most of them believe that Yeats eulogizes Maud Gonne's beauty and expresses his desire for and sorrow to the unattainable lady. This paper disagrees with such opinion. Actually, Yeats' female images are worth of exploration for their colorfulness and richness and these images reflect poet's creative psychology. This paper classifies female images in Yeats' poems in detail, and investigates the motif of his pursuit of them. With the investigation of Yeats' creative psyche and object, the author hopes that the research of Yeats' poetry as a whole could go further.When Yeats' created female images in the poems of the early period, male position in society was being challenged by the women's suffrage movement in Ireland. It was popular and fashionable for male writers to create perfect female images at the time to satisfy their traditional psychology. With an eye on Maud Gonne, Yeats' created many female images characterized by beauty and obedience. These female images seldom reflect the spiritual pursuit of modern women.Being influenced by Yeats' study of religion and faith, Yeats' female images turn into those of artists (representing pursuit of art and eternity), or wisdom women in the poems of the late period. Irish nationalism and Occult philosophy, theology, aristocratic idea of bloodline help to resolve the conflicts in his mind. Though female images no longer reflect the individual spiritual pursuit yet, they express poet's exploration of the world and its truth. The female images turn from beautiful women of the early period to vague women with profundity, universality and abstraction of the late period. These female images embody Yeats' understanding of art, life and humanity more than those individual, beautiful ones of the early period.