“Crazy Jane poems” are a representative sequence in Yeats's later love poems. They are generally known as songs of the ‘earthly’ and bodily love, especially a commitment to the pleasure of the sexual love. But they are also a commitment to death and ‘the transcendental’. This article proposes to read “Crazy Jane poems” as songs of the dualistic oppositions and conflicts between ‘the earthly’ and ‘the transcendental’, examining how Crazy Jane, as a Yeats's mask, solves the conflicts and seeks out the unity with her philosophy of love. Opposing the Bishop's narrow dualism which divides earth and heaven, body and soul, Crazy Jane suggests a unified point of view, putting earth and heaven on the same horizon and insisting that body and soul should be united in the satisfied love. Presupposing unlimited reincarnations, Crazy Jane seeks to redeem the purity of her soul through the purgatory of the earthly love. Jack the Journeyman, the love's “skein unwound” between Jane and Jack, the “enlightened house, uninhabited and ruinous” in Jane's vision, “the place of excrement”, and the passionate dancing like “the lion's tooth”, all of these are the images unifying ‘the earthly’ and ‘the transcendental’, rooted in Crazy Jane's deep consciousness. In a series of love poems narrated by woman, such as “Crazy Jane poems” and A Woman Young and Old, Yeats explores the feminine in himself and the experience of love from woman's point of view. For Crazy Jane, the earthly love is an experience of the limitless within the limit, the shadow of eternity in time, in short, a symbol of the unity of ‘the earthly’ and ‘the transcendental’. But exorcising Crazy Jane and her philosophy of love, the poet was once more preoccupied with the problem of the dualistic oppositions and conflicts in writing “Vacillation”. Writing on that subject again and again might be the poet's inevitable purgatory.

“Crazy Jane poems” are a representative sequence in Yeats's later love poems. They are generally known as songs of the ‘earthly’ and bodily love, especially a commitment to the pleasure of the sexual love. But they are also a commitment to death and ‘the transcendental’. This article proposes to read “Crazy Jane poems” as songs of the dualistic oppositions and conflicts between ‘the earthly’ and ‘the transcendental’, examining how Crazy Jane, as a Yeats's mask, solves the conflicts and seeks out the unity with her philosophy of love. Opposing the Bishop's narrow dualism which divides earth and heaven, body and soul, Crazy Jane suggests a unified point of view, putting earth and heaven on the same horizon and insisting that body and soul should be united in the satisfied love. Presupposing unlimited reincarnations, Crazy Jane seeks to redeem the purity of her soul through the purgatory of the earthly love. Jack the Journeyman, the love's “skein unwound” between Jane and Jack, the “enlightened house, uninhabited and ruinous” in Jane's vision, “the place of excrement”, and the passionate dancing like “the lion's tooth”, all of these are the images unifying ‘the earthly’ and ‘the transcendental’, rooted in Crazy Jane's deep consciousness. In a series of love poems narrated by woman, such as “Crazy Jane poems” and A Woman Young and Old, Yeats explores the feminine in himself and the experience of love from woman's point of view. For Crazy Jane, the earthly love is an experience of the limitless within the limit, the shadow of eternity in time, in short, a symbol of the unity of ‘the earthly’ and ‘the transcendental’. But exorcising Crazy Jane and her philosophy of love, the poet was once more preoccupied with the problem of the dualistic oppositions and conflicts in writing “Vacillation”. Writing on that subject again and again might be the poet's inevitable purgatory.

W. B. Yeats, Crazy Jane, the earthly, the transcendental, earthly love, dualistic conflicts