ABSTRACT
The poet's consciousness of the organic relationship between mythology and nationality has been translated into three anthologies of Irish fairy and folk tales and legends: Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, Irish Fairy Tales, and The Celtic Twilight. Translating myth into racial genus and genius is a common manoeuvre in the rhetoric of nationalism: nations are built on founding myths. The Romans have Virgil's myth of creation rooted in their collective memory. Aeneas escapes from Troy to lay the foundations of the Roman Empire. Yeats's celebration of this national reverie or Spiritus Mundi is as much driven by romantic nationalism as by the quest for poetic individuality. Mythic time is not profane time'. Rather, it presents itself as an antithesis to historical time. Poems on Cuchulain and other mythic figures dominated Yeats's imagination to the end. Yeats compares Maud Gonne to Helen for her ravishing and destructive beauty.
