This article examines the problem of historical construction during the period of armed resistance in 1920s by analyzing Yeats’s “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen.” After briefly dealing with the characteristics of Irish Nationalists’ discourses in the early 1920s, particularly in the light of Republican and Free State appeals to Ireland’s noble past, it discusses how Yeats rejected the nationalists’ heroic sacrificial history that had served to support the normalization of violence and the reactionary and oppressive politics and how he refused another tale of heroic martyrdom readily inscribed into a Republican narrative.

• 윤일환(한양대학교 영어영문학과 교수) | Ilhwan Yoon