Abstract:
This being a work of literary criticism, the literary-critical approach is predominant throughout. This means that the symbolic value of, for instance, myths and rituals is emphasised, although their philosophic and anthropologic meanings have to be recognised in providing overtones. The discussions of philosophies centre for the same reason on their value as providers of ideas or as literary source material, and not primarily on the merits or demerits of their respective systems. Yeats's development is divided into three literary stages, corresponding to the cultural stages of the Egypt, Greece, and Rome of his sources. They are Unity of Faith, Intellectual Synthesis, and Harmony of Practice. Unity of Faith may be explained as that stage of Yeats's use of symbols, in which the symbol is believed to have a specific meaning. In the intellectual synthesis this belief is justified in argument, and in the Harmony of Practice the argued-out symbols are used, without the justifications that formed the poems in the Intellectual Synthesis. To illustrate Yeats's three stages only five poems and a short play have been studied in detail to show how the literary devices he gathered from his developing sources, are employed in different stages of his poetry. These by no means exhaust the field, but they show the way, which can be followed by further studies of this kind.
