This paper aims to explore the processes of poetic transformation of Ireland matter in W. B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney and compare the two poets’ characteristics of attitudes to Irish politics. Even though one does not have any idea of their poetic prepositions in their poetry, there can be some understanding of the relationship between each poet’s poetic material and his works of poem. Yeats and Heaney keep distances themselves from Ireland in their poetry as a man does to woman. Some critics’ attacks that the contamination of literary discourse by political statements points to the poetics of Yeats and Heaney, and those attacks are resulted from the notion of the identification of woman with the land, which are the characteristics of these two poets. To the tradition of romantic love poems Yeats admires the Ireland and its people and transforms them into a sort of mythology. That is to speak that love poems and patriotic poems are blended in Yeats. With this point of view one feels in reading Yeats’s poems the period after the Easter Uprising of 1916, like “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” or “Easter 1916” and “September 1913,” a terrible new beauty that changes the old political and moral landscape. He struggles to question the situations caused the bloody violences and sacrifices. With this questioning he mystifies the imagined or ideal community. The essential Yeatsian themes and attitudes sound through the earlier works of Heaney. He draws an analogy between the preserved bodies of human sacrifices in the peatbogs of Denmark and corpses on the streets of contemporary Northern Ireland. And He employs gender stereotypes and myths to describe the violent and depressive situations in Ireland in his poems. Sometimes he uses myths, whether of apocalypse or sacrifice. But he always takes a questioning stance toward the power of mythic signification. In “The Tollund Man” the speaker comprehends the transforming and eternalizing power of myth and he also recognizes that power as a ‘blasphemy’ because it averts his, and the reader’s, eyes away from the specific victims and from the horror of the individual violent act.With this focusing on the individual victims, Heaney gives voice to those victims who can no longer speak, not silencing their individual voices on favour of a single voice and eternalizing their mythic power.

• 허현숙(건국대) | Huh, Hyun Sook