This paper explores how Yeats sublimates the ideas of Pythagoras into his art. Yeats accepts Pythagoras’s transmigration of the souls, weaving it into his ideas, and emphasizes not the life of the other world but that of the current moment of this world. Pythagoras explains the concept of numbers, comparing the Perfect Number to a chord of music. Completing their reality, human beings can go to Elysium, the Greek ideal world. Yeats also employs Pythagoras’s imagery in his poems, building his own concept of transmigration. He divides the transmigration into six phases, similar to the transmigration of souls present in Buddhism. But, unlike Pythagoras, he explains how human beings have escaped from transmigration. In this scheme, humans, accomplishing their ultimate reality, achieve Unity of Being. In short, Yeats builds upon the ideas of Pythagoras regarding transmigration, but further emphasizes that this world is more important than the next.
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