A Vision and Yeats’s Late Masks

A mask seems a stable thing, an artificial and fixed image to fit over a mobile human face. In trying to make sense of the concept of the Mask in Yeats’s long creative and intellectual practice, however, a sort of Dorian Gray-like difficulty arises. The image itself does not stay still. Some of the shifts in the idea of the Mask in Yeats’s work and thought, and the implications of these changes, are the topics of this essay. My main emphasis will be on the shifts that occur between the two ve..