Yeats published the first edition of A Vision in 1925 and the revised edition in 1937. He had poured the most intense concentration of his intellect into it for 20 years. It may be regarded as the greatest of Yeats’s works, containing some of the most penetrating and beautiful prose that he wrote. It is essential to any understanding of many of his most notable poems and plays. But many critics agreed it was difficult to read and understand; it is extraordinarily distilled, yet complex in an extremely precise way. In this thesis I compared “Unity of Being” in Yeats’s A Vision with “Dao” in Lao Zi’s Dao De Jing. I interpreted the similarity between the theories of Yeats and Lao Zi. In A Vision Yeats explained 28 incarnations according to the 28 phases of the moon, the Great Wheel and the deliverance of the bond of rebirth. His major symbols are the gyres, the double triangle or the primary or objective and the antithetical or subjective. The Four Faculties(Will, Mask, Creative Mind, and Body of Fate) and the Four Principles(Husk, Passionate Body, Spirit, and Celestial Body) are related to the two contrasting tinctures. The antithetical gyre is lunar, aesthetic, expressive, multiple, hierarchial, aristocratic, artistic, particular, creative. The primary gyre is solar, moral, dogmatic unifying, humane, democratic, scientific, abstract. There is a state of perpetual conflit between the gyres and the moment of harmony of the gyres. The gyres are living each other’s death, dying each other's life. In Dao De Jing Lao Zi explained the dual character of the “Dao” operate as Being-Without-Form and Being-Within-Form, or Heaven and Earth, interrelated so closely the two sides of a coin. Yeats wanted to teach us what is the ultimate reality is and we can attain the “Unity of Being” at the moment of harmony of antinomies. The ultimate reality because neither one or many, concord nor discord, is symbolized as a phaseless sphere, but as all things fall into series of antinomies in human experience it becomes, the moment it is thought of, what he describe as the Thirteenth cone. Lao Zi insisted, “the world is oneness, or unity, emerging from the moment of the Dao.” Yeats also told us, “Eternity, though motionless itself, appears to be in motion.”
예이츠 및 관련 분야에 대한 회원들의 학문 발전을 도모하고 연구 의욕을 고취시키기 위해 다음과 같은 일을 기획하고 수행함을 그 목적으로 한다.
1) 학술 발표회 및 세미나 개최
2) 학술 정보의 수집과 자료 교환
3) 연구논문집 『한국예이츠저널』(The Yeats Journal of Korea) 발간
4) 회원 상호간의 학문적 교류와 친목 도모