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In this paper, through appreciating one of W. B. Yeats’s later poems, I try to find how the poet’s creative self gets to have its creative power and in what mechanism it expands its poetic circumference. “Among School Children” is the very poem his poetic self and creative imagination are well wrought into. In the poem, the poet suggests that power and knowledge cannot exist together, speaking of the powerful theories of Plato and simultaneously of the philosopher’s powerless being before Nature. He praises Aristotle as a king of kings, and
Pythagoras as world-famous golden-thighed, but he mocks them of being old clothes upon an old stick to scare a bird. In the same way, he asserts that “the body is not bruised to pleasure soul.” In the sense of deconstructionists, all the binary oppositions have their hierarchies; however, Yeats puts the two antithetical elements on the identical level, as they are not subordinated to each other, and tries to bridge the abyss or space between.
Such an attempt to unite the opposite worlds is manifested in his A Vision.
Concerning his “gyre” theory, the figure is frequently drawn as a double cone.
The one is called primary gyre, representing space, intellect, mask and fortune; the other antithetical one to represent time, emotion, creativity and will. The narrow end of each cone is in the centre of the broad end of the other. Seen at the narrow end of each cone through the centre of each broad end, appears a circle having a dot at the center. This is the poet’s world of imagination whose centre is his “self” and whose circumference is the limit of the self’s perception. The poet’s life-long activities are related with his efforts to expand the circumference. “Among School Children” is a trace of such activities. The centre is the place where the self of the poet is located; the circumference is where the self “perceives its limitation,” or where arises the feeling of awe, terror, or ecstasy, which means a kind of tension geared between the binary opposite worlds: the finite and the infinite; the mortal and the immortal; life and death; the real and the ideal; youth and age; the body and soul; pleasure and despair.
The perception network of the poet connects the centre and circumference.
The power to widen the circle originates from the poet’s paradoxical sense of life, of deprivation, and of renunciation through an attainable love with Maud Gonne, tensions between religious struggles, civil revolutions, and so on. The sharp confrontation of these tensions takes place rise to in the circumference and stimulates the poet’s creative imagination. This power of self strengthened by these tensions starts its quest-journey to explore the mysteries beyond the limit of its circle: the mysteries of the opposite worlds separated here and there. The ultimate purpose of the journey, finally, is to reach the united condition of the two worlds, which means what Greg Johnson calls “the highest imaginative enhancement of human identity” or immortality. This united world is the place where “we cannot know the dancer from the dance” and where Yeats’s “unity of being” is synthesized.