식민주의의 억압 하에서 예이츠와 소월은 문학과 민족의 정체성을 연계하여 민족정신을 다시 불러일으키려 한다. 두 시인은 신화와 민담에서 민족의 정신적인 근원을 찾아내고 이를 시에 담는다. 예이츠는 정신적 힘을 지닌 신화와 민담을 통해 아일랜드를 “상상의 공동체”로서 창조한다. 반면 소월은 신화와 민담에서 식민주의에서 고통 받는 민족의 고통을 실제적으로 환기시킴으로써 역설적으로 민족의 정신을 고취한다.

This study is on Irish Fairies in Fairy and Folk Tales in Ireland with a foreword by Kathleen Raine edited by Yeats for Korean readers. Nowadays many Korean editions about celtic culture were published after 2000. Fairy and Folk Tales in Ireland is the first American edition by Colin Smythe Limited in 1973. This volume contains Fairy and Folk Tales of Irish Peasantry, first published in 1888, and Irish Fairy Tales, first published in 1892. In this volume Yeats divided Irish Fairies into two great classes: the sociable and solitary and described the characteristics of each fairies, and then collected 8 fairy poems and 16 stories. Every poem and story in this volume is very interesting to me. Yeats is the best selector. The sociable fairies who go about in troops, and quarrel, and make love, much as men and women do, are divided into land fairies and water faires or Merrows(mermaid, merman). The solitary fairies who are nearly all gloomy and terrible in some way. However there are some among them who have light hearts and brave attire. There are the Lepracaun, the Cluricaun, the Far Darrig, the Pooka, the Dullahan, the Banshee. In Irish folk-lore Yeats had come across these fairies many others undiscovered.He had thanks to Patrick Kennedy, Miss Maclintock, Lady Wilde, Mr. Douglas Hyde. Mr. Allingham, Fergusson, and Miss O'Leary. He quoted from their works. His role is a vital linker in a chain of truly apostolic transmission of traditional lore. Evans-Wentz dedicated his first remarkable anthropological work, The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries(1911) to Yeats and G. Russell(A.E). According to Kathleen Raine, Yeats's own interest in the "Matter of Faerie" was two fold. In part, certainly, it was a literary admiration for the highly formalized art of story-telling, and perhaps for the Irish use of the English language, those idiomatic turns of phase which arise from translation, by Gaelic-speakers, from one language to the other. Yeats who believed in Fairy-Faith to perpetuated in popular form mysterious taught by the Druids see, like A. E and Evans-Wentz, in Tir-na-N'Og, the land of the Sidhe, Ploto's and Plotinus' "yonder" when our souls descend and where they return. They also thought the Fairy-Faith belong to a doctrine of souls. In the Irish fairy poems and stories there are great beliefs in fairies. But Irish people remember the word, 'Be careful, and do not seek too much about fairies.'