Unlike his early symbolic mode that is based on the natural representation of organic universe, Yeats’s later works are constructed in the allegorical mode which is based on the antinomies and oppositions that can be defined by rhetoric, form, tone and thematic motifs. If the antinomies are Yeats's central means of perceiving and interpreting the world, what kinds of experience are posited in the center of his life, and in what manner are those experiences represented? The aim of this essay is to approach, through his poetic sequence “Meditations in Time of Civil War”, Yeats’s frame of mind which perceives the world as a series of fixed set of antinomies. Yeats’s later lyric mode is connected, in a very complex manner, with the contradictions and conflicts which arise from what Michel Foucault calls “the absolute power of life and death” and “the life-administering power”. He believed that if the political power and the family authority were to be maintained in modern Ireland, he as poet should embody the ancient forms of power in the aesthetic domain. Such idea leads him to enact in his own works the oral tradition of ancient poetry. He thinks that, leaning on the model of ancient magical arts, modern lyric poet could embody the absolute power of death in his poetry. The literary mode which enacts such power and authority can function as one of the main agents that break the comedic power of modern individualism. Yeats’s idea of absolute power and authority is, however, in constant contradiction with the life-administering power of modern society. Therefore, despite the poet’s strong desire to enact the tragic authority of ancient bard, the poetic space of “Meditations in Time of Civil War” remains the complex site of contradictions and conflicts between the residual forms of Anglo-Irish traditional culture and the dominant cultural forms of modern individualism. It is a disruptive space in which what Fredric Jameson calls the “reversibility” and “disjunction” of modern literary text are embodied in thematic, figural and formal levels.

• 김철수(경북대) | Chul-Soo Kim