Gaiety In Darkness

W. B. Yeats (1865-1939), the winner of Nobel Prize for literature in the year of 1923, was honored by T. S. Eliot as "the greatest poet of our age—certainly the greatest in this language" of English. And Ezra Pound referred to him as "the only poet worthy of serious study". He was one of the most important figures in the transitional period from Romanticism to Modernism, struggled for a systematic updating of subject matter and style throughout his literary career and wrote extraordinary poems in every school he was involved in whether it was Post-Romanticism, Aestheticism, Symbolism or Modernism. In his later years, skillfully combining reality, symbols and metaphysics together, he formed his own unique systems of philosophy and symbolism, thus inscribing his name in literary history of the world as well as that of Ireland. Yeats labeled himself a socialist, one who despised the middle classes and his ideal Ireland was divided between a hard-riding Protestant of fine artistic tastes and a devout Catholic peasantry, full of instinctive wisdom and preserving a living folklore. Irish legend and folklore are the sources of Yeats' creation.The thesis deals with Yeats' creation of a world and argues that this world system is conceived as tragic through the study of Yeats' dance plays, the material which culminates in A Vision and Cuchulain, and the hero who dominates Yeats' world. Aristotle defines tragedy in terms of pity and fear; Yeats defines it in terms of terror and delights what he calls the Vision of Evil and Unity of Being. The balance is delicate. Yeats concentrates on the tension between the terror and delight, on their conflict. But the dark side, the Vision of Evil, is always threatening to break through. Terror and the Vision of Evil dominate in Yeats' play. The thesis begins with interpreting Cuchulain who is one of the most important archetype heroes, aiming to explore the inevitability of the hero's defeat and ending with death in Yeats' created tragic world through the analysis of works On Baile 's Strand and The Death of Cuchulain, etc. At the same time, Yeats constructs, in A Vision, a system which ensures and to some extent explains the necessity of the hero's defeat.A Vision, Yeats' system providing a framework or world-picture in which tragedy is inevitability, is an expression of reality itself. It is a complex and frustrating work and makes easy to get lost in a maze of bizarre jargon. The thesis will concentrate on some aspects of it which are concerned with tragic vision. A Vision expresses four related ideas which are central to the tragic vision in Yeats. The first concerns its title. Yeats' system is vision, apocalypse, revelation, judgment day. The second area of A Vision central to tragic vision is its description of two opposed states of being, the Vision of Evil and Unity of Being, or phase one and phase fifteen of Yeats' system. For Yeats, tragic vision is a fusion of these two extremes. A third area of A Vision defines and explores the nature of the tragic encounter between man and his opposite. Finally, running through all these areas, we have the cyclical nature of Yeats' system, which ensures a pessimistic vision of life.This thesis is divided into five parts. Chapter One briefly introduces the main research of this thesis. In Chapter Two, I concentrate on an exploration of Yeats' description of Cuchulain as the archetypal hero. The hero is uncompromising; Yeats' treatment of the heroic is far from straightforward. Yeats' Cuchulain is simple, but constantly opposed by complexity, deception. These forces are personified by the supernatural figures of the Sidhe who is demon, but also by a surface world increasingly hostile to the heroic treatment. Cuchulain is at war both with himself and with his milieu or his environment. In Chapter Three I will draw attention to A Vision, in which the idea of revelation dominates. I argue that this vision, revelation or apocalypse is a tragic one, and my aim in this chapter is to show how Yeats' system providing a framework or world-picture in which tragedy is inevitable, is an expression of reality itself. Chapter Four is the tragic outcome, which is the death of the hero. I examine The Death of Cuchulain as the focal point for a summing-up of the tragic world presented by Yeats. With the figure of Cuchulain, however, Yeats does not simply emphasize the hero's opposition to external forces. He penetrates within the hero's personality. Two battles are being fought. The destiny of death of the heroes is inevitable and the death of the heroes seen as the final irony of fate. Here again we are brought to vision, death and hero's self-recognition. In the last part, I would like to conclude this discussion of Yeats' tragic universe by summing up its most distinctive features. From the hero of the early poem "Cuchulain's Fight with the Sea", to the exploration and creation of A Vision's world system - in which civilizations are spread beneath our feet in an endless and inescapable process of birth and death; from the tortured figures of Oedipus, Swift and the Old Man of Purgatory - the tales return to the lonely figure of Cuchulain facing death. We are conscious of ironies, twists of fate and, above all, conflict, exhilaration, and the impetus towards an intense vision which is both self-destructive and a re-creation of the self.