Being of mixed blood and living as artists in a society of colonial cultures, Yeats and Walcott developed almost the same kind of poetics. Their major poetics centered on individual struggle to reconcile the disparities of human existence - past and present, individual and society, nationalism and colonialism. For them, particularly poetry is a means to redeem the inarticulate and unformed society into which they were born, creating the self in the process of writing about the problems of national identity. In this essay, I tried to shed light on the poetics of nationalism in Yeats and Walcott through their poetic self - Yeats’s Mask and Walcott’s Crusoe. Yeats’s Mask is a way of attempting to restore the lost unity between artifice and sincerity, art and nature, an example of the wholeness he sought to achieve, and a means of combatting the erosion of exterior fate. His doctrine of the Mask offered him a technique by which he could strengthen his own personality and shape his art. Seeking to be what he was not, Yeats disciplined himself and his art to form. As the expression of a great life it urges a man on to remake himself in order to be worthy of it. And this was what Yeats intended his art to do. Walcott’s Crusoe may be Yeats’s Mask as an alter ego which is the pure truth of self. He is also Proteus, a mythological figure who can change him into various shapes. Through his poetic self Crusoe, Walcott tried to answer his own questioning. The questioning can be about himself, and himself surrounded in the disjointedness of the world. Through this self-questioning, his poetic vision draws the figure it based on the poetic mediation. In a word, Yeats and Walcott not only enlarged their poetic horizon, but deepened their insight into national identity by creating their poetic self.

• 한일동(용인대) | Il-Dong Han