Unity of Being and the Mask in W. B. Yeats’s Poems

Abstract

W. B. Yeats was generally known as one of ‘the end-of-the-century’ romantic poets and as a poet who was “one of the greatest poets of our time―certainly the greatest in this language.” The main goal throughout his poetic career was to pursue a “Unity of Being.” He expressed it like that of a “perfectly proportioned body,” where harmony emerges from conflicts between emotion and reason, between the mind and body, and between the sun and moon. A Vision, including ‘theory of the Mask,’ took charge as the philosophical framework for his imagination, and the concept of “Unity of Being” is represented in his poem “Among School Children” through the images the “blossoming of blossom” of the chestnut-tree, and the “dancing of dancer.” ‘The Mask,’ a dramatic device, serves the function of the social self, defensive armour, and attactive weapon.” Moreover, his “Vacillation,” “The Mask,” and “Ego Dominus Tuus” were written for the Mask, the anti-self, antithetical phase, and antithesis because he felt the “Unity of Being” emerges from “the quarrel between the self and anti-self” as well as between “opposites.”