After the publication of his book, The Wanderings of Oisin and the Other Poems in 1899 Yeats was keenly interested in the non-English cultures of the British Isles. It was known as the Celtic Twilight. In 1898 he published a volume of essays called “The Celtic Twilight” containing a number of folk stories. In 1891 he founded the Irish Literary Society and worked on a three-volume edition of the poetry of Blake, which was published in 1893. Because of this involvement he pursued the study of symbolism, which is so important for his poetry. The evidence of this is to be found in his two volumes of the decade, The Rose(1893) and The Wind Among the Reeds(1899), with their many uses of the rose and other symbols. Lady Gregory encouraged Yeats’s interest in folk-lores, visiting with him the homes of her tenants and listening to their stories. She also encouraged him to work for the theatre, which led him to the founding of the Irish National Theatre Society in 1902. In this way Yeats attempted to solve the two problems that were central to him as a public poet: the general problem of symbols in literature in an age lacking a common tradition and the particular problems presented by the confusions of the Irish situation. He was impelled to find a way of putting Ireland into some mental order, so that cultural symbols of dependable significance would be at the disposal of the artist. In this context I read the two poems, “To the Rose Upon the Rood of Time” and “The Song of Wandering Aengus” as the manifestations of the Celtic, symbolic tradition of the Irish elite and the tradition of the Irish people respectively. But in the 1890s and the early 1900s, for all his identification with the Gaelic ethos, a wistful hope remained for leadership from a regenerated landlord class. The Ireland that Yeats envisaged was a nation with a distinctive cultural and spiritual identity, and he imagined a community free of sectarian differences and conflicts. That vision was not as revolutionary as some critics have supposed, and it hardly outlasted the 1890s. A century later, however, we find an unusual amount of interest in his early writings.

• 김철수(경북대) | Kim, Chul-Soo