이 논문은 예이츠의 시극이론에 중요한 영향력을 행사한 인물 중 하나 인 독일의 작곡가 리하르트 바그너에 초점을 맞춘다. 기존의 예이츠 연구에서 바그너 는 서양지성사의 일반론적 맥락에서 언급된 것 외에 본격적으로 주목받지 못했다. 이 논문은 예이츠의 시극 이론과 아일랜드 문예부흥론을 바그너의 악극 이론과 예술론을 통해 새롭게 조명한다. 예이츠 미학의 초기에 발견되는 예술론과 시극이론에 주된 영 향을 미친 인물로 니체보다 바그너에 더 주목함으로써 예이츠 연구에 새로운 지평선 을 여는 데 그 목적을 둔다.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the value of W. B. Yeats’s penultimate play, Purgatory. It is a one-act verse play. There are only two characters: An Old Man and A Boy. Its story is simple. The Old Man tells his son (A Boy) of his family’s past: the mésalliance of his mother and his father’s squandering of everything she had, which he considers pollution to his family and declares as a capital offence. The Old Man kills his son with the knife he used to kill his father to stop the pollution from passing on to the next generation, and to stop the ‘Dreaming Back’ process for his mother. Purgatory is as much a play about the end of a historical cycle as it is a personal story. The obvious decline of the old man’s family fortune is an image of a ruined Ireland, its vigour spent and its thought forced in upon its own past. The qualities that have caused Purgatory to be one of Yeats’s most admired plays is the condensation and compression of his material, coupled with a lucid and immediately accessible realistic plot. The characters, actions and images are both natural and symbolic, moving and meaningful. The real strength of Purgatory lies in its unobtrusive poetic quality, the harmony of realistic subject matter and symbolist design within a lyrical composition of undoubted concentration and power. In Purgatory, more than anything else, Yeats solved the problem of speech in verse drama, which is one of his contributions to modern drama. Instead of contrasting voice patterns, he unified the action with a freely varied verse form in iambic tetrameters which is admirably suited to the terse, sharp idiom of modern speech. The most remarkable feature of this very natural verse form is its ability to reflect emotional intensification as the rising dramatic action moves through contrast and reversal to its inevitable climax.