“Ego Dominus
Tuus” is one of W.B. Yeats’s later poems published in The Wild Swans at Coole (1919). This paper purports to put forward
the idea that like other dialogue poems of Yeats it is meant to resolve a
crisis in the poetic life of Yeats. The poet wishes to find out, rather travel
into the mindset of, a new ideology of poetic creation – or karyitri pratibha as it is called in
Sanskrit poetics. He held earlier, under the influence of his father, that a
work of art should bring out the artist’s authentic personality. Now he is
trying to believe that the artist in his work tries to show exactly what he is not
but would like to be, his ‘antithetical self’ or ‘Daimon’.
Prof.
Amiya Bhushan Sharma is affiliated to the Department of English, Indira
Gandhi National Open University, India. He may be contacted at
sharma.amiya@gmail.com.