This paper examines W. B. Yeats’s pursuit of Unity of Being and the perfect life through his Poetics of Death. For Yeats, death is not an end but a transformation through which temporal life attains permanence in art. His later works— The Tower, The Winding Stair, and Last Poems-reflect a cyclical vision from A Vision, where widening and narrowing gyres symbolize the interplay of life and death. Drawing on Georg Simmel’s Metaphysics of Death, this study interprets death as an inner principle giving form to life. In A Vision, the Daimonic Man embodies the perfect life achieved through the creative tension between self and anti-self. In “Leda and the Swan” and “Lapis Lazuli,” destruction and renewal converge, transforming tragedy into joy. Ultimately, Yeats’s Poetics of Death reveals mortality as a condition for artistic permanence and the unity of the artifice of eternity.
Yong-Woo Jin (Sun,) studied this question.