W. B. Yeats and Thomas Hardy, as poets, were contemporaries. Their long careers spanned the transition from Romanticism to Modernism and their poetry constitute two of the most powerful dealings with that transition and those traditions. Younger poets after Yeats and Hardy have attested to their significant influences on their works respectively. Until 1930s it seems that the poets preferred Hardy as their poetic model, but after the 30s such a stand has become unpersuasive. Considering the course and interdependence of these two poets’ reputations and influences, we are led to acknowledge that Yeats and Hardy defined the options for poets for the whole period of the 20th century and that consequently poets have tended to be divided into two distinguishable streams. This paper aims to distinguish those different streams through the poetic works of Yeats and Hardy. There is some hint of determinism in both Yeats and Hardy, but with very important difference. In Yeats’s early poetry human weakness is implied despite a heavy-handed insistence on nature’s sympathetic; identification with man. But Hardy’s poetry implies a human strength in the face of a nature indifferent to man’s social arrangements and adjustments. Yeats proceeds dramatically to make a system, a private mythology; Hardy shows the structure of a mind capable of coming to a disturbing conclusion. Both Yeats and Hardy find nature for the most part unsympathetic to man, but while Yeats prefers to escape to a dreamy or fairy land or The Great Mind, Hardy illustrates man’s own resistance and adjustment within this world of reality. So, while Yeats offers a vision of a higher reality beyond or behind nature, Hardy, as a result of his acute scrutiny of appearances of the real world, offers us personal and narrative instances of man’s responses to the neutrality of nature. Hardy’s dealings with reality are for the most part moral, while those of Yeats’s incline to amorality, which means that Yeats allows himself to wander far from an acknowledgment of the limits of our individual lives and strengths. These different attitudes to reality lead to their poetic tone: Hardy’s-control of tone, Yeats’s being high and energetic. Considering the comparative characteristics of Yeats and Hardy we are led to conclude that they defined the options for the younger poets following after then: experimental and traditional, modernist and anti-modernist visionary, and discursive and rhetorical and plain.

• 허현숙(Konkuk University) | Huh, Hyun Sook