This is a paper that shows how poetic dialogue plays upon poems between three different authors, William Butler Yeats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. Many of Yeats' poems broach a gentle issue of how they respond to their poetic precursors. "Among School Children" can be read as an updated version of a Romantic "conversation" poem. Coleridge applied the term "conversational poem" to "The Nightingale," one of twenty-tree poems in Lyrical Ballads of 1798. Earlier than this, a phrase Sermoni propriora ("suitable for conversation") appears in his "Reflections, On Having Left a Place of Retirement." These two poems demonstrate Coleridge's conscious efforts at experimenting with conversational speech as a legitimate poetic language. Coleridge's conversational mode is in full bloom in such remarkable poems as "The Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" and "Frost at Midnight," the latter a masterful lyric that paves ways for Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" in its compositional mode and structure. The traffic between the two Romantic authors and "Among School Children" is obvious--a noticeable parallelism is developed in terms of diction, figures, thematic structure, and rhetorical devices. Yeats's "Among School Children" serves as a poetic testimony to the on-going lyrical dialogue that explores possible links between the workings of different poetic minds and that creates remarkable echoing effects.

• 주혁규(부산대) | Hyeuk Kyu Joo