A Study on Memory and Occultism in W. B. Yeats’s Poetry

Memory in poetry has been a long-standing art method. For W. B. Yeats, memory is a pivotal starting point of his poetry writing. Memory functions as a magic principle which he learned from occultism of Theosophical Society and Golden Dawn. In Yeats’s poetic world, memories and minds are ever shifting and flowing into a part of Great Memory, a reservoir of a universal being called Anima Mundi of occultism, which forms racial, historical, or cultural memory. It is the common resources of memory where poets and readers can communicate.
Yeats, throughout his career as a poet, made an attempt to evoke past memories and re-created them into poetic forms in a way of correspondence, incorporating the memories of archetypical symbols, of the past Celtic Ireland, and of his personal past events. Yeats excavated the common cultural resources from Great Memory and made a new art with them. Yeats’s poetic persona does not present the evoked memory as it was, but mixes it with other memories. In turning memories into a new creation, Yeats integrated mental process into poetry writing actively and constructively through the various ways of evocation, meditation, reverie, mask, dreaming back, spiritualism, or stream of consciousness. He tried to transform the human thoughts and feelings, which are invisible, into artistic images. Memory, for Yeats, becomes reborn and re-presented in the artistic forms of visible images, symbols, emblems, and mosaics.
Yeats''s process of making the art of memory, unlike that of other modernist poets, is notable because he used the spiritual power, daimon, as a creative mind. The supernatural daimon can evoke past memories stored human unconscious mind, transforming them into a visible art. This evoking process also occurs in dreaming back, the stage that the spirits in purgatory are forced to repeat the memories of his life. Dreaming back leads to phantasmagoria of chaos in which all the memories are melted. A new and fresh image of poetry can be created in phantasmagoria, equivalent to the unconsciousness in a psychological term, that connects all the fragments. This study concludes that Yeats''s later poetry especially bears the mark of this involuntary alchemical unification of fragmentary and discontinuous memories.