Conclusion

Abstract

The enormous diversity of themes and subject matter, forms and styles in Yeats’s plays present a very specific problem of approach as well as of interpretation and understanding. A number of critics concentrate on Yeats’s esoteric philosophy as an end in itself and write about A Vision as though it were a sacred text. Such a view tends to emphasise Yeats’s importance as a polemicist rather than a playwright and to ignore the dramatic qualities of his work for the theatre. It is far more sensible to take the system as a schematic arrangement of human experience which provides images and metaphors for poetic drama rather than a mystical hieroglyph or mandala. Readers should aim at working out an interpretation of symbols and structures as they emerge or develop in the plays and present images of either sociological or psychological reality. Another group of critics is preoccupied with the creative role of myth and the ideal of an archetypal culture hero which pervade the plays, while still others concentrate on the development of dramatic form and technique. Yeats’s creative experiments with symbolic and archetypal ritual for the theatre have attracted a good deal of interest as has his redefinition of tragedy.