아일랜드의 신화와 전설에 대한 예이츠의 관심은 민족문학에 대한 보존과 기록의 단순한 물리적 의무감에 머물지 않고 그의 평생에 걸친 관심이며 시정신의 기초가 되는 세계령의 사상으로 승화하고 있다. 아일랜드 지방에서 그가 수집한 신화와 전설들이 지역적인 한계에서 벗어나 유럽문화의 기본이 되는 그리스와 로마의 사상을 대치할 수 있는 보편성을 지니고 있으며 세계의 큰기억에 융합되어 역사의 흐름을 조관하는 에너지가 되고 있음을 알 수 있다. 예이츠의 초기 소설들은 직접적으로는 신화와 전설에 그 이야기의 바탕을 두고 있다. 또한 작가의 신앙, 역사, 그리고 특히 그의 신비종교적인 관심에 비추어 현실에서 벗어나 미지와 신비의 가치를 추구하지만 결국 인간적인 한계로 인해 실패하고야 만다는 이야기를 주로 다룬다. 장미, 여명, 십자가 등 풍부한 예술적, 종교적 상징의 사용과 함께 인간과 (보통의 인간이 아니라 예지의 능력이 있거나 영웅적인 인간들) 귀신(ghost)과 정령들(spirit)이 함께 어울려 신의 세계와 인간의 세계에 대한 구분이 확실하지 않은 배경에서 진행되는 이 작품들은 기독교와 신비종교, 물질의 세계와 영적 세계, 고유성과 전체성 등의 대립을 통해 발생한 에너지를 바탕으로 천상의 빛을 찾으려는 시도로 보인다. 신화의 세계를 경험한 노인들의 경험담이라는 형식을 통해 예이츠는 사라져 가는 아일랜드의 신화를 저장하여 큰기억으로 만들려고 하였으며, 동시에 그가 신봉하였던 영적인 세계를 표현하려고 시도했다.

Yeats’s study of fairy had occupied him steadily for fifteen years from 1887 to 1902. He continued to study in connection with spiritualism until 1915. Yeats’s own collection of Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry had been published in 1888, Irish Fairy Tales in 1892 and The Celtic Twilight in 1893 before he met Lady Gregory. Any theory about nature of the fairy-faith shared with her came from Yeats, and he claims originality. In writing The Celtic Twilight(1902) his study of fairy was deepened by his collecting trips with Lady Gregory. The result of Yeats’s collaboration with lady Gregory was not to appear until 1920 when she published her two volume edition of Visions and Beliefs in West of Ireland, “Collected and arranged by Lady Gregory: with two essays and notes by W. B. Yeats.” Yeats’s essays(both dated 1914) were “Swedenborg, Mediums and Desolate Places” and “Witches and Wizards in Irish Folk-lore.” Like all the Irish antiquarians, Yeats also commonly referred to the fairies as “the people of Raths,” “the Danaan nations,” “The Tribes of the Goddess Danu,” In Fairy and Folk Tales he explains the Galic terms. The Irish word for fairy is sheehogue[sidheog], a diminutive of “shee” in banshee. Fairies are deenee shee[daoine shee](fairy people) In Irish tradition anyone may be taken by the sidhe, but there is, in fact a hierarchy of those who are most desirable. Yeats follows this tradition in one of his first poems about the sidhe, “The Stolen Child.” As Yeats understood the Irish tradition, the sidhe can do nothing the help of mortals and it is for this reason that they must always seek out humans. When the sidhe takes someone that person is said to be “away.” As a spiritualist would interpret this, it means that the soul has left the body and is travelling with the fairies. Often when appears ill or asleep or “lies in a dead faint upon the ground” it is because that the person is “away.” The Sidhe, according to Yeats’s countrymen, never takes anyone or anything without leaving some changeling in its place. In The Only Jealousy of Emer―Yeats’s most successful and moving dramatization and use of a changeling― Emer guesses that Cuchulain is “away.” When people are taken to live with the sidhe, they take on supernatural powers and work and live just as the Shape Changers that they are amongst. The chief distinction to be made between the shide and the dead is that the dead returns to the earth as ghosts of their former selves, whereas the sidhes are the everlasting ones. The idea that the fairy faith is in reality a doctrine of souls was lent supported by the fact that the country people say that almost all who are dead are taken by the sidhes. As the place where souls temporarily reside, the middle land of the sidhe is the Bardo of the Tibetans, the summerland of the Spiritualists, and ethereal world of theosophy and magic. Yeats saw his studies of spiritualism as a continuation of his studies of fairy, both of them as leading to the beginning of his philosophy. His study of fairy led him to the formulation of two theories that makes his system possible―that of Anima Mundi and that of the “airy body” or “vehicle” of the soul. A Vision is the result of his study about the fairy.

The nature poems of G. M. Hopkins is generally characterized as a sensitive observation on the natural objects. But the most distinctive character of his poems is in its motion and trembling. It is related with his peculiar poetic concept ‘inscape’ and ‘instress.’ We can see too many proves of this moving in Hopkins’s poetry. In his nature poems, every tree, spring water and grass is alive. Even the cloud is described as a moving life force in his diary or poems. It is surprising to be able to see so many life forces in one poet’s poems. This life force is more distinguished in his poem “The Windhover” or other poems of animal. And its climax, we can see in his poem “Harry, the Ploughman.” In this poem we can see wonderful observation on the body of a strong farmer. He observed even the minute motion of muscles one by one and he seems to be glad to see this manly body. Hopkins has an inclination of the socialist and he liked more the labouring men than the cultured weak people. Another example is Tom in “Tom’s Garland” and the blacksmith in “Felix Randal.” This is in striking contrast to Yeats’s early nature poems which are considered as a dreamy poetic world. Yeats was too devoted to one woman’s love and his early poems are a kind of escape from this world. His nature is a retirement place from this world. Contrary to this, Hopkins’s nature is a life itself. For him the whole world and nature are a great and perfect work of God. And he caught its highest moment in its motion, that is inscape.

From time to time Yeats’s concept of death baffles us, since he asserts in A Vision that in effect death is neither absence nor nothing but a recurrence of life in other body and other state. No doubt this elaborate myth of reincarnation is an important element of his system, but acceptance of it as his definitive view of death would lead us down several interpretive blind valley. If there is no annihilation of self, then how can we explain the effort of lyric after lyric to summon up heroic energy in the face of death? Moreover, death for him is something that elicits abundant imagination. By analyzing Yeats’s ‘death’ poems, I attempt at some answers to these questions. I begin with the discussion of the ‘reincarnation’ reflected in “A Dialogue of Self and Soul.” In contrast to the Soul who asserts that one must concentrate on the “darkness” of death, imitating as nearly as possible that future state, the Self, provoked by death, reaffirms the present state. The Self reviews life to deny neither imagination nor the senses; rather it reasserts their ultimate worth. If “Dialogue of Self and Soul” is willing to embrace life again in the face of death, “Under Ben Bulben” internalizes authority to quell death. The speaker ruthlessly suppresses his own vulnerabilities with authoritative commands and the voice of his dead father. The discourse in the poem seems abstracted from the poet’s own life, as if spoken by his now disembodied but empowered voice, a voice from a timeless nowhere beyond the grave. “The Apparition,” another poem dealing with death, however, uncovers the terror that undercuts the assertion of ‘joy’ in “A Dialogue of Self and Soul” and “Under Ben Bulben.” No matter how each poem responds to death, however, it is clear that death cannot be approached directly. It is “Man and the Echo” that allows the good picture of the necessary indirectness of one’s meditation on death. The rabbit’s cry of pain interrupts the deathward meditation. This moment of rupture suggests that “Man” can only think death indirectly, through trope and turn. In “Death,” by turning to the logic of lack and repetition, I attempt to provide some possible answers to why Yeats moves to-and-fro between the repression of death and the avowal of its finality. In “Lapis Lazuli” The poet replaces the marks of time with the self-begetting images. Associated with the regenerative power of water and seasons, the immaterial possibilities supplant the marks on the stone’s surface symbolic of literal death. In its internal time the poet creates poetic possibilities that rise from the external time that decays. In short, death for Yeats ‘causes’ life, and opens up the place that is retroactively filled out by life. But above all death inspires, brings about, and dignifies his poetic imagination. Yeats depends on the muse of death for the aesthetics of his poetry. In his poetry he rehearses death every day.

예이츠가 레이디 그레고리와 더불어 아일랜드 문예부흥운동 및 아일랜드 연극운동을 견인하고, 장기간에 걸쳐 애비 극장의 책임자로 활동한 것은 널리 알려진 일이다. 그 기간 동안 예이츠는 극장의 행정을 담당하고 공연의 예술적 지표를 설정하는 외에, 극작가로서 활동의 지평을 넓히기도 하였다. 이 논문에서는 예이츠의 를 중심으로, 한국 탈춤이 그의 후기 희곡 작품에 어떤 영향을 끼쳤는지를 논구한다. 서양의 연극적 관습이 표현의 한계에 봉착했다고 진단한 예이츠는 그 탈출구를 동양의 전통극에서 찾고자 노력하였다. 이 과정에서 그는 주일 영국대사관에 봉직했던 페날로사의 원고를 에즈라 파운드가 정리한 책으로부터 일본의 전통극 노(能)에 관한 정보를 습득하고, 나름대로 새로운 연극적 문법을 창시하였다. 악사들을 무대 위로 올려 관중들이 그들의 존재를 곧바로 인지하도록 하고, 등장인물들과 악사 간에 대화를 나누도록 하며, 별도의 장치 전환 없이 배우들이 무대를 몇 바퀴 도는 행위만으로 극중 장소의 변경을 적시하려 한 점 등이다. 이는 근대 이후의 서양적 연극관습에 정면으로 반기를 들고, 새로운 시공간 개념을 도입하려한 시도에 다름 아니다. 일본의 전통극 노(能)가 공연양식, 탈의 활용법 등을 기준으로 한국의 탈춤, 특히 서낭굿 탈놀이와 방법론적 유사성을 보인다는 것은 주지의 사실이다. 한국의 탈춤과 일본의 노(能)는 공히 불교 선교극에 예술적 뿌리를 두고 있다. <일본서기(日本書紀)>를 보면, 나라시대(奈良時代: 646-794)에 백제(百濟)로부터 기악(枝樂)이라는 공연 양식이 전래되었다는 기록이 있다. 이것이 곧 오늘날의 노(能)이다. 이와 같은 전파과정을 고려하면, 한국의 탈춤이 예이츠의 후기 희곡에 간접적인 영향을 주었다는 결론에 다다르게 된다. 예이츠가 차용한 악사의 역할, 그리고 연극적 공간의 활용법은 표면적으로는 한국 탈춤의 경우와 상당히 흡사하다. 그러나, 예이츠의 희곡과 한국 탈춤의 채록본을 분석하면, 공연의 전체적인 맥락 안에서 논의되는 이 두 요소의 연극적 기능에 본질적인 차이가 내재하고 있음을 발견하게 된다. 이와 같은 바탕 위에서, 본 고에서는 탈춤과 예이츠 희곡 간의 유사성 및 상이점을 자세하게 논구하였다. 나아가, 예이츠가 ‘총체극의 현현일 뿐 아니라 가장 첨단의 공연 양식’이라고 평가했던 동양 전통극의 공연관습이, 한국의 연극 운동 지도자들에게 전근대적이라고 폄하된 까닭을 고찰하였다. 이 문제와 이어지는 ‘연극적 근대성’의 개념에 대한 논쟁을 비교 분석하는 일은 지면 관계상 다음 기회로 미뤄 두기로 한다.

It is well known that Yeats loved Maud Gonne all through his life. Even after she married John MacBride and he married George Hyde Lees, he couldn’t stop loving her. He proposed to her many times not only before she married but also after she became a widow. But she didn’t accept his courtship, saying that platonic love could make their love everlasting. She even said that the poems were their children for she made them possible by “sowing the unrest & storm.” This kind of love and/or friendship made Yeats write lots of poems about her and his longing for her love. The poems about her began to be written in his early youth in The Rose. After that many poems were written on and off through his long poetic career to Last Poems. The poems about her are more than fifty or so. The poems portrayed her as an ideal beauty like Helen and/or as a goddess of love and beauty like Aphrodite. Sometimes he complained her not accepting his courtship. At times he blamed her for engaging in the political movement of Ireland’s independence too deep. From time to time he lamented her marrying a “drunken, vainglorious lout.” But he loved “the pilgrim soul” in her all through his life. Though Yeats complained and blamed and lamented Maud Gonne’s human aspect, he idealized her divine aspect in his poems. He idealized her as a Rose, Helen of Troy and/or Aphrodite. That was the best way to keep her beauty everlasting. Though she suffered many human difficulties, she was an ideal beauty to Yeats to the end.

The philosophical idea behind ‘The Celtic Twilight’ has never properly been studied. My firm belief is that our full understanding of the work of Yeats is impossible without our thorough recognition of his philosophical idea behind ‘The Celtic Twilight’ in his poetic development. That is why I am going to offer this study as a beginning of the exploration of ‘The Celtic Twilight’ in order to throw light on his literary ideal in his formative years. The Celtic Twilight School, of which W. B. Yeats was the acknowledged, became fashionable during the nineties and had considerable influence: its delicate impressionism, its shadowy themes, other-worldly longings and subtle wavering rhythms were in accord with the Fin de Siecle Movement. ‘The Celtic Twilight’ of the last decade of the century was no new phenomenon in literature. It was essentially a re-naming and re-ordering of a familiar trait, the ‘folk spirit’, marked by the heightened passions and superstitions common to all literature rising from the people, and given new life by the recent scientific studies of folklore and myth culminating in Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough in 1890. In addition, it possessed a strong tendency towards melancholy which attracted the mystics of Maeterlinck’s school. But the new elements in ‘The Celtic Twilight’ was a sense of place, as opposed to a vague atmosphere. Life and mood became more pointed by the close relationship between nature and emotion. In a general sense this element of the Celtic spirit could be considered a natural outgrowth of the Pantheism or nature-worship of the Romantics influenced by the mystics’ renewed interest in Druidism; more specifically it arose from a self-conscious intellectual attempt to inject fresh life into well-known themes and develop a new approach to old form. The symbolist turns from the barren glass of the outer world to the truth embodied in his own heart. To be brought beyond the limitations of his individual being, however, and into communion with the Great Mind and Memory of the Universe, he needs also a ‘traditional mythology’. Yeats turned for this tradition and mythology to the legend and folklore of his own country, for like Synge and Lady Gregory he believed that Irish peasant was untouched by the materialism and scientific investigations resulting from the restless Renaissance, that the Irish peasant still maintained contact with the mystery and imagination that existed before man fell a slave to the external world. His search, consequently, was for the traditions which lay buried in peasants’ huts and cottages. Yeats was an Irish poet on one hand, and a poet interested in magic and occult on the other. Beginning in 1889, he began to integrate his interests and goals, attempting to become one man - an Irish poet, using Irish subject matter, welding into his technique and statements the substance of magic and mythology. As a poet with ambitions to make a ‘new utterance’, Yeats depended on what he could make of the Celtic past for two main reasons: first, his interests and beliefs had directed him toward finding a kind of Ur-mythology from the time when he first discovered the correspondence between Indian, Hermetic, Theosophic, and Blakean thought; second, and of equal importance, was his position as an outsider in contemporary Ireland, his position as an Anglo-Irishman. Yeats turned to pre-Christian Celtic mythology for the basis of his subject matter both to root his poetry and his own sense of being an Irish poet; he sought a mythology for his poetry and for himself. And he claimed that the artists through their “contact with the soil”, that is, the folk, could create a national literature, since folklore is “the soil where all great art is rooted”. Then he studied and used magic, visions, profound legends, Celtic mythologies, poetic traditions, folklore, and history of the Celtic past to make ‘the old culture of Celtic Ireland’ and ‘exaltation of life itself’ come alive and reaffirm the power of imagination and hope. Accordingly his poetry of ‘The Celtic Twilight’ is an affirmation of folklore and mythology. Folklore and mythology are the tools with which to open the Celtic past, make it present, and thus create a great art rooted in the soil of Folk-belief. Folklore was in Yeats’s eyes the perfect expression of the intermediate world in which gods and mortals met, because the peasants regarded the natural objects around him as signs of divine essences. They had, like the ancient Greeks, mythologized their ‘haunted’ surroundings in stories passed on to many later generations through an oral tradition, thus not only preserving the truth about the divine reality, but also producing a heritage still applicable to everyday life. Yeats claimed that Ireland had created ‘the most beautiful literature of a whole people that had been anywhere since Greece and Rome’, while English literature is ‘yet the literature of a few’. The reason was that ‘Irish stories had been made to be spoken or sung’, while English literature ‘had all but completely shaped itself in the printing-press’. Therefore Yeats’s literary ideal was to bridge the written and unwritten traditions, to establish a learned literary tradition on emotions that came from the heart of the people, and to create from the shock of new material and from a tradition that had never found expression in sophisticated literature a new style, a new mood of the soul. In his poetic career he has sought out an ‘image that blossoms a rose’ deep in the heart, an image that makes ‘all nature murmur in response if but a single note be touched’, and has created a literature that ‘taps the secret spring of all our lives’ and achieves the enduring beauty of great art.

Through his long poetic career from 1885 to 1939 Yeats was preoccupied with the dualistic nature in this world―the ideal against the real, body against soul, and Self against Anti-self. He was aware that these conflicts and contradictions were necessary for the mental growth in man and through the struggles between these opposites he might achieve the state of the whole. In his attitude toward life Yeats embraced with open mind both what he was and what he wanted bo be. The two opposites are co-existent and inseparable so as to be united into the Whole Being. Yeats had applied the symbols of ‘sexual union’ and ‘dance’ to his poetry in order to express ecstatic experience of ‘Unity of Being.’ This paper traces up Yeats’s attitudes toward life, and studies the aspects of conflicts and contradictions, through which he may attain the ‘Unity of Being,’ the ideal that Yeats had searched throughout his poetry and other activities.