This study of Yeats's early poetry (The Wanderings of Oisin), plays, and mystical prose (A Vision) is an effort to explain the poet's magical uses of poetic and dramatic devices—image, symbol, mask—as the attempt to manage various childhood traumata, Oedipal conflicts, generalized fears of loss, a problematic body image, and a confused sexual identity. Stressing Yeats's crucial relationships with women (his mother, his wife, Olivia Shakespear, Maud Gonne, Lady Gregory) and the prevalence in his works of Oedipal fantasies of dreamlike, immortal