Yeats' Imaginative Myth-Making and Mysticism:

Yeats had a deep fascination with mysticism and the occult, and his poetry is infused with a sense of the otherworldly, the spiritual, and the unknown. His interest in the occult began with his study of Theosophy as a young man and expanded and developed through his participation in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a mystical secret society. Mysticism figures prominently in Yeats’ discussion of the reincarnation of the soul, as well as in his philosophical model of the conical gyres used to explain the journey of the soul, the passage of time, and the guiding hand of fate. Mysticism and the occult occur again and again in Yeats’ poetry, most explicitly in “The Second Coming” but also in poems such as “Sailing to Byzantium” and “Among the School Children”.

Yeats thought himself to be one of the last of the classical Romantics; he celebrated the power of imagination to help people see and empathize deeply. Yeats was greatly influenced by early nineteenth-century artist William Blake, who emphasized the supreme importance of visionary imagination. Harold Bloom notes, "Yeats knew himself to be the heir of a great tradition in poetry, of the visionaries who have sought to make a more human man, to resolve all the sunderings of consciousness through the agency of the imagination.””

He recognized the dangers of abstract reasoning divorced from imagination and the natural world, and he sought a kind of lost knowledge not taught in schools or churches. Yeats rejected realistic, imitative art. He believed that only art that recognized and celebrated the pan-psychic power of imagination, myth, and symbol could reveal the deeper truths and intuitive meanings underlying everyday experience.

Yeats’ lifelong study of mythology, Theosophy, spiritualism, philosophy, and the occult demonstrate his profound interest in the divine and how it interacts with humanity. Over the course of his life, he created a complex system of spirituality, using the image of interlocking gyres to map out the development and reincarnation of the soul. His interest in mysticism and the occult led him to explore spiritually and philosophically complex subjects.

He hoped that the images he conjured would arouse trance-like states of mystical awareness in the reader and deep insight into the world around them. Yeats, dishevelled wandering star, as he was, continued to develop his poetic style and thought until the time of his death. He labored heroically to combine his idealistic, escapist perspective with an unflinching look at life in the world with all its messy particulars and wrenching agonies, what he dubbed the fury and the mire of human veins.”

By nature he was a dreamer, a thinker, who fell under the spell of the folk-lore and the superstitions of the Irish peasantry. Yeats was engaged in numerous esoteric practices: he performed ceremonial magic, studied Hindu philosophy and meditation, and as a young man interviewed rural Irish elders about their experiences in the uncanny realm of faery. Yeats was keen to replace traditional Greek and Roman mythological figures with figures from Irish folklore. The juxtaposition of the past and the present, the spiritual and the physical, and many such dissimilar concepts and his condensed rich language make his poetry obscure. In Sailing To Byzantium, he describes the cryptic realm of spirits for which he so fervently searched.

Before me floats an image, man or shade,
Shade more than man, more image than a shade;
For Hades bobbin bound in mummy-cloth
May unwind the winding path

The mystical and invisible dimensions of life and consciousness fascinated Yeats. He was not convinced by the teachings of dogmatic Christianity, nor was he satisfied by his father's insistently skeptical outlook on matters spiritual. Rejecting these two contraries, Yeats pursued his spiritual yearnings in the ancient yet experimental Western esoteric tradition:

“But seek alone to hear the strange things said
By God to the bright hearts of those long dead,
And learn to chant a tongue men do not know.”

Being disillusioned by lack of harmony and strength in modern culture, Yeats tried to revive the ancient spells and chant to bring unity and a spirit of integration in modern civilization torn by conflicts and dissensions. Yeats was not content to merely read about or profess belief in a divine reality. He wanted nothing less than gnosis, knowledge and insight of this hyper-real dimension culled from direct, trance-like experiences of super-sensory, subtle realms of consciousness.

This pursuit of unorthodox and bizarre forms of knowledge not only piqued Yeats’ curiosity about the nature of life and the depths of the mind, but also provided him with an abundance of potent ideas and images for many of his poems. Byzantium” evokes a world of phantasmagoric rapture and revelation.

Dying into a dance,
An agony of trance,
An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.
Astraddle on the dolphin’s mire and blood,
Spirit after spirit! The smithies break the flood,

In a nut-shell, Yeats “possesses an imaginative mysticism, an essential attribute of Celticism, he has the ability to efface the outlines of material objects in a dreamy    mistiness.”