This paper aims to explore the processes of poetic transformation of Ireland matter in W. B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney and compare the two poets’ characteristics of attitudes to Irish politics. Even though one does not have any idea of their poetic prepositions in their poetry, there can be some understanding of the relationship between each poet’s poetic material and his works of poem. Yeats and Heaney keep distances themselves from Ireland in their poetry as a man does to woman. Some critics’ attacks that the contamination of literary discourse by political statements points to the poetics of Yeats and Heaney, and those attacks are resulted from the notion of the identification of woman with the land, which are the characteristics of these two poets. To the tradition of romantic love poems Yeats admires the Ireland and its people and transforms them into a sort of mythology. That is to speak that love poems and patriotic poems are blended in Yeats. With this point of view one feels in reading Yeats’s poems the period after the Easter Uprising of 1916, like “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” or “Easter 1916” and “September 1913,” a terrible new beauty that changes the old political and moral landscape. He struggles to question the situations caused the bloody violences and sacrifices. With this questioning he mystifies the imagined or ideal community. The essential Yeatsian themes and attitudes sound through the earlier works of Heaney. He draws an analogy between the preserved bodies of human sacrifices in the peatbogs of Denmark and corpses on the streets of contemporary Northern Ireland. And He employs gender stereotypes and myths to describe the violent and depressive situations in Ireland in his poems. Sometimes he uses myths, whether of apocalypse or sacrifice. But he always takes a questioning stance toward the power of mythic signification. In “The Tollund Man” the speaker comprehends the transforming and eternalizing power of myth and he also recognizes that power as a ‘blasphemy’ because it averts his, and the reader’s, eyes away from the specific victims and from the horror of the individual violent act.With this focusing on the individual victims, Heaney gives voice to those victims who can no longer speak, not silencing their individual voices on favour of a single voice and eternalizing their mythic power.

이 논문은 Yeats의 초기시 “To Ireland in Coming Times"를 분석 이해하는 것에 목적을 두고 있다. 분석의 방법으로 주제적 접근과 전기적 방법이 이용되어 이 시를 쓸 당시 Yeats의 정치적 활동과 접신술에의 경도, 그리고 Maud Gonne과의 만남 등을 배경으로 살펴보았다. 그리하여 이 작품에서 Yeats의 정치적 활동과 신비주의를 작품 속에서 접목시키고자 한 그의 시인으로서의 시도와 그의 사랑과 꿈이 이 작품 속에 용해되어 있음을 알게 되었다. 뿐만 아니라 더 나아가 이러한 주제적, 전기적 접근을 통해 이 작품은 Yeats 시세계의 하나의 출발로 이후 그의 시들에 변용 또는 변주되어 나타나는 주제와 이미지들이 저장되어 있음도 드러난다.