A Gift of Vision: A Study in the Mythology of William Butler Yeats

Abstract

If it were possible, I would like to crawl into the mind of William Butler Yeats end trace with him the history of the myth. Although we cannot become Yeats, we can, through his poetry, look at the long history of the myth and the mythological as he might have viewed it. Our definitions may not always be those that the literary scholar uses when talking about the myth; our examples may not always be true mythology - often we will be dealing with philosophical theories that formed the 'myth' of a particular age. But these were the aspects of mythology that Yeats used and these are the bases for that part of his thought upon which he built bis personal myth. If we can clarity the position of the myth throughout history, if we can trace the ebb and flow of the mythological throughout the ages of man, we can deal more intelligently with the specific elements of the myth found in the writing of Yeats.