In my paper I want to look at Yeats' terrific and original sense of aesthetics. I think that beginning in his middle period, he often approached beauty as terrifying. Ecstasy is derived from the Latin for "terror", and this is the typical sort of Yeatsian ecstasy. Beauty offers the poet transcendence, but to a fiercer, more brutal plane. His aesthetics could be called awesome, in the older sense of the word.
Poem 311, "Ribh in Ecstasy", is instructive. The poem's speaker, surely a facet of the poet's own personality, describes sex between cosmic entities, "Godhead on Godhead". The potency of their union triggers a feeling of riveted powerlessness. The effect is heightened by the ominous next line "Some shadow fell". The last lines compare this cosmic sex to the average, every day encounter, amorous cries that...come" and then must return to routine.
The poem is also helpful for showing the connection between Yeat's aesthetics and poetics. The first lines, "What matter that you understood no word!/Doubtless I spoke or sang what I had heard/in broken sentences", gives the uneasy, almost inverse relationship between being very moved and being able to say, at what, or why. Some of Yeats' most beautiful poems are also his least comprehensible; the connection isn't accidental.
"Lapis Lazuli" describes the destruction of "Old civilisations" and the consequences, and finds joy in the apocalyptic topic. Yeats almost seems to be laughing at the prospect of war. Is it because he considers it inconsequential, given the great unknown forces he believed were guiding the world? Is the promise of rebirth, and new growth, enough to compensate for the casualties? The very beautiful lines that take us from a lapis lazuli statue into a scene on a hill, a "tragic scene" though not unbroken by the hint of new life in the form of flowering trees, are key. This is the mysterious "transfiguring" that links terror with beauty.
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Good, but... Look up "ecstasis" in a philosophical dictionary. In a philosophical sense, it also means self-transcendence, much discussed by Levinas etc. Yeats and beauty is a complex subject, and, truly, he sees the antinomal paradox of the beautiful and terrible contained in beauty. Beauty in a Platonic sense also represents something ideal, in the sense of being connected to the "forms" or ideas that constitute the real reality. I would bring some other core text - such as Plato's "Aesthetics" to give you some limits. Yeats and classical aesthetics. Or limit it in some other way... Yeats and the Romantic sense of beauty versus the modern? Yeats and the image of Helen or Leda as a destructive beauty (connects to Maud Gonne, whom he thought ruined his life). But "Yeats and Aesthetics" - that's a book. In fact, you might look at Patrick Keane's "Terrible Beauty," among others. But Keane talks about the "beauty as destructive" theme. Luck.
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