Yeats and Maud Gonne: (Auto)Biographical and Artistic Intersection‪.‬

Unlike many other heroines, Maud Gonne lives a separate life with her distinct personality in Yeats's works. Yeats's poems and letters and memoirs disclose a relationship of temperamental and ideological differences between the two a relationship of unrequited love and out-of-body experience, sexual longing and unfulfillment complicated with the dynamics of their spiritual interests as well as psychosexual anxieties. It was a politically charged and mystically coded relationship. This essay attempts to present the different stages of Yeats's poetic presentation of Maud Gonne, her own autobiographical description of her relationship to the poet, and the way his frustrated love complemented his poetic philosophy. It shows how the idea of Maud Gonne served as a direct inspiration for Yeats's poetic creativity and how a sense of devotion, defeat, and melancholy pervades his work, allowing him to recreate an idealized Romantic past. This essay attempts to give a picture not only of Yeats's lyrical portrait of her but also his struggle to understand all she stood for. **********