Ireland, under British colonial rule, had radically developed independence movement since the middle of the 19th century and had gone through confusion and turmoils. Irish conflict was caused by the racial, religious and class struggle, which divided the people into each different ideological party. Irish predicament had begun with the union with England, and in the colonial situation Ireland had to go through the transitonal stage into modernity. From the late 19th century to the middle of the 20th century Yeats's poetic career evolved and Ireland was in need of making its own subjectivity under the double difficulty caused by the colonial and transitional circumstances. Yeats's poems were written in the troubled context. When he is considered as a nationalist poet, historical context has been taken as a reflective background. But considering that Yeats's poems recontextualize history, which is the source of his poetry, his poems must be interpreted in the historical context. The nationalist movement which Yeats pursued both in poetry and politics can be identified as a cultural discourse. The ideology of Yeats's cultural nationalism represents the Irish historical context and functions as revealing Irish problems. In this essay, I try to examine Yeats's cultural nationalism as a cultural discourse with the applicaton of new historicist and cultural materialist methods which intend the recovery of historicity and the resisting function of discourse.

• 안경원(연세대) | Kyungwon Ahn