Abstract

The Double Perspective of Yeats's Aesthetic offers penetrating insights into the poet's aesthetic principles. These are characterised, Professor Komesu demonstrates, by a polarity of perspective. He argues that Yeats envisaged life as both unity and conflict, and regarded art as an embodiment of both experience and knowledge. The peculiar nature of this Yeatsian polarity is that the conflicting perspectives are not irreconcilably at war, but exist in a complementary relationship, in which one lives the other's death, and dies the other's life. Professor Komesu finds this polarised perspective inherent in the literary theory of the West, constituting a discernible tradition that shapes such divergent artistic movements as Classicism and Romanticism. He contends that Yeats's place must be found within this tradition.