Yeats's ideal others: the Dantean mask of Yeats's late phase

W. B. Yeats was a poet deeply concerned with making and remaking himself through his work. As a part of that mission Yeats tended very often to follow the example of his most beloved precursors. However, Yeats’s precursors are almost always imagined figures, reinvented by the Irish poet as his needs or interests proscribe: ideal others. Yeats criticism brims with insightful and exhaustive research on the poet’s relationship with certain ideal others. Blake is often considered to be Yeats’s ultimate ideal other, not least because of Yeats’s own comments on the matter, but also due to the lifelong love the poet held for Blake and his adoption of the Blakean principle of contraries into the poet’s own system of correspondences in his late career. However, this thesis seeks to show that, while Blake may indeed have been the dominant ideal other of Yeats’s early phase, it was, in fact, Dante Alighieri, the epic Italian poet of the fourteenth century, who became the foremost ideal other of the poet’s late phase. Through a close analysis of the work of Yeats’s middle and late phases this research will demonstrate how the Irish poet sought to create an enduring poetic image in the western poetic tradition. A penchant for beautiful lofty things and the deeper mysteries of the inner and outer worlds led the older Yeats to the stony image of Dante. Attracted first to the poet who loved the most exalted lady in Christendom, as Yeats matured from a dreamy poet to a grander public figure, Yeats found in Dante the perfect model for the quest poet, a poet emblematic of worldly knowledge, spiritual wisdom, and transcendental romantic love.