ABSTRACT
This chapter concentrates on the confluence of aesthetic and philosophical principles in Pessoa's and Yeats's poetics, derived to a great extent from Romantic and Victorian aesthetic theories discussed in Shelley's A Defence of Poetry and in Matthew Arnold's and Walter Pater's critical essays. It argues that the poets' stylistic diversification hinged on a theory of poetry as a hermeneutic method of ontological, epistemological and metaphysical inquiry, examining the manner in which these issues were articulated in their poetry. Pessoa and Yeats envisaged writing as a philosophical inquiry into the nature of the Self and its position in the World which ultimately sought some sort of ontological and metaphysical revelation of the true nature of selfhood and existence. The antithetical relationship of the heteronyms reflects Pessoa's interpretation of Nietzsche's Apollonian and Dionysian principles of the Greek aesthetic ideal delineated from Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, which he identified respectively with 'balance, harmony and rationalism' and with 'intense vitality'.
