A new movement, a desire for a new world, emerged all over Europe when the French Revolution broke out in 1789. In England which had suffered from structural contradictions, such as suppression of social system, political conservatism, and excessively rationalism, the intellectuals regarded this movement as the wave of freedom and hope, and expected impetuously a new world to come soon. With a response to this new spirit many writers had expressed their freedom and ideal in poems. Also, Shelley(1792-1822) participated actively in the wave of freedom. Especially, in “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” (1816) he describes very much a free and ideal world. In the poem, he describes his freedom and ideal as “intellectual beauty.” In the late 19th century, Ireland which had wanted ardently independence from England fell into political disorder. Yeats (1865-1939) wanted his country to become an ideal society, and so began to lead the Ireland’s Renaissance. He was influenced by Romanticism and Pre-Raphaelitism, and seemed to tend to describe an ideal land with such motifs as Irish myths, legends and symbols like rose, which represents his ideal land. Both Shelley and Yeats tried to describe their ideal world in their poems. In “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” Shelley describes his ideal world as the world filled with illusory lights of intellectual beauty, whereas Yeats describes his world as a world of “eternal beauty” in “To the Rose upon the Rood of Time”. Thus, in this paper, I intend to compare Shelley’s intellectual beauty with Yeats’s eternal beauty and the relationship of a poet to actuality and to God in their poems.

• 차진석(한양대) | Cha, Jinseok