예이츠는 작가로서의 여정을 시작할 때부터 아일랜드의 과거의 영광과 영웅들의 이야기, 그리고 신화와 전설, 민담 등을 통해 문화적 민족주의를 고취하려고 노력했다. 이는 당시 영국의 식민지였던 조국의 독립과 평화를 위한 그 나름의 노력이 었다. 그러나 당시에 영국과 직접 전쟁을 하며 아일랜드의 독립을 위해 싸우던 정치가 들은 예이츠 초기의 민족주의적 작품들을 사람들로 하여금 아일랜드를 위해 목숨을 바쳐 영국과 싸우라는 의미로 왜곡하여 소개하며 그들의 이해와 목적을 위해 오독하 고 있다. 예이츠는 부활절봉기와 내전을 거치면서 그의 작품들이 정치적으로 오독되는 것을 보면서 그가 초기에 순수한 마음으로 민족주의적인 작품을 썼다는 것에 대해 후 회하면서 책임감을 느끼고 있다. 이 논문에서는 부활절봉기와 내전에서 정치가들이 오 독하고 있는 그의 시를 살펴보면서 예이츠의 후회하는 반응을 확인해 보고 있다.

예이츠의 문학 활동은 ‘문화 민족주의’운동을 통해 아일랜드의 독립을 추구하려는 끊임없는 노력으로 볼 수 있다. 그는 아일랜드의 시골에서 오랫동안 구전된 켈트의 전설, 민담, 설화 및 민요에 큰 관심을 갖고 보편적인 경험으로 공유하는 신들, 요정들, 영웅들의 이야기에서 민족의 감정을 되살리려 한다. 예이츠는 복잡한 이해관계로 얽힌 아일랜드의 현실 정치와 거리를 유지하면서도 문화와 민족정신의 회복 을 통해 독립을 이룰 수 있다고 믿는다. 한편 예이츠의 신비주의 상징주의 경향의 작품성은 문학의 선동적 기능을 추구하던 강성 아일랜드 민족주의자들과 갈등하고 대립하는 양상으로 전개된다.

Aiming to understand the poetry of W. B. Yeats in terms of gender, sexuality, and politics, this paper reads some major poems of his early years. The first part of the paper reads the poems in which the masculine world of war, science, and political power is negated in favor of the feminine world of nature, poetry, and wisdom. The present writer of the paper considers that the femininity of these poems, expressed in the pastoral world of the shepherd, or the stories of Irish legendary King Goll, Fergus, and the fairyland, comes from Yeats's poetic attempt to surmount the British imperial and materialistic world by enhancing the Irish cultural traditions and values. The next part reads a group of poems which deal with Yeats's love of Maud Gonne. Using the image of the rose or the courtly genre, both of them being old traditional poetic conventions, the poet represents Maud Gonne either as a goddess of eternal beauty or a woman of heroic nobility. However, she is also represented as a woman of "lonely face" and "pilgrim soul," a woman who brings "the sorrow of love," or a woman repeatedly associated with the tragic world of Troy. This ambivalence or double vision in the poet's representation of her seems to result form Yeats's ambiguous attitude to Maud Gonne and her revolutionary and social work. The last part of the paper deals with two poems and a play which represent Ireland as a woman. The use of a woman figure as symbolic image of Ireland, especially Yeats's use of Cathleen ni Houlihan in his poetry and drama, is important, because it most distinctively reveals the relations between sexual politics and aesthetic value in the early poetry of Yeats. In this respect, the writer of this paper notes that the woman figure in these works is a highly romanticized and idealized one, rather than a real one with human body and sexual desire, and thinks that this is related to Yeats's version of Iriish nationalism with its strengths and limitations.

Some critics have argued that William Butler Yeats and Irish Literary Revivalist defend nationalism in symbolic compensation in the form of mythologizing for the loss and trauma which result from the long history of the British colonial rule. Their focus has been the Celtic mythology and that of Mother Ireland. Other critics present their counter-argument by designating James Joyce as the precursor of the counter-movement which manifests the resistance against Yeatsian mythologizing among the exiled poets such as Beckett, Flann O’Brien, and Thomas MacGeevy, including Joyce. Establishing such polarity in the approaches to modern and contemporary Irish poetry in this way will produce a problematic logic which causes a secondary binary opposition between extreme nationalism and abstract cosmopolitanism. In attempts to avoid a futile reconciliation of the two arguments, one needs to redefine or deconstruct the master or grand narratives concerning myth, nation, and nationalism. Also, one might feel it necessary to provide a persuasive discussion of the interrelationship between myth and nationalism. Recent theorists such as Benedict Anderson, Lia Greenfield, Homi Bhabham, and Eric Hobsbawm have provided persuasive theories about nationalism and beyond-nationalism. Critics such as Tom Garvin, Desmond Fennell, Marianne Elliott, Roy Foster, Seamus Deane, Declan Kiberd, and Luke Gibbons have investigated the potential methodology to overcome the logic of binary opposition concerning Irish nationalism from the self-reflective perspective. The common ground of these critics and theorists is based upon the definition of nationalism in terms of what Benedict Anderson calls “imagined community” which is based upon the discursive anchors such as narrative, myth, and symbol. Irish national myth offers one of the most typical case study for this “imagined construction.” Using Richard Kearney’s term “post-nationalism,” the objective of this paper is to present a perspective of post-nationalism, and to demonstrate the polyphonic voices of modern and contemporary Irish poets, starting from Yeats and Joyce who have been approved among critics as the poets of the two mainstreams in 20th-century Irish poetry to those post-Yeatsian/Joycean poets such as Patrick Kavanagh, Austin Clarke, Thomas Kinsella, Seamus Heaney, and Derek Mahon, to name a few. My anchors of discussion are mythologizing, demythologizing, and remythologizing.

In my article titled “Nationalism of William B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney in their early poetry: mythic nationalism and realistic national consciousness” which was published in The Journal of English Language & Literature Vol. 45 No. 3, I analyzed three among four factors of nationalism (implicated) in the two poets’ early poetry, that is, ethnicity, language, territory. This article deals with one remaining factor of nationalism, religion, in their middle poetry. Religion is so powerful an influence in Ireland that Irish nationalism can be considered Irish Catholic Nationalism. The political, religious, and economic conflicts between Anglo-Irish Protestants and Catholic Irish made Ireland divided into Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland, after Ireland was liberated from British imperialism in 1922. The native Irish who had lost even their mother tongue, Gaelic during the colonial period of almost 800 years ruled by the British Empire sought their national identity in Catholicism and made the religious oppression of Britain their centripetal force. To Yeats, religion was not a dogmatic faith of institutionalized religion but a field in which his imagination of the supernatural is allowed full play to go beyond the ephemeral real world to the eternal spiritual world. He set the Irish religious identity on Irish countrymen’s native faith in faerie, ghost, eternity of soul, and the world of magic expressed in Irish legends, folklore, myths, and oral traditions. He satisfied his hunger for the ultimate truth of universe with the Irish ancient faith in the mystical world of the everlasting soul and the visionary as well as various kinds of mysticism in the East and the West. The mystical religious identity of the native Irish emphasized by him anticipated the continuous collisions among him, the Catholic pulpit and Irish nationalists. His romantic belief in a heroic spiritual Ireland materialized his Irish Literary Movement and his idealized Anglo-Irish Ascendancy culture was far from the political nationalism of the middle class of Ireland, the political class of the people democracy. Seamus Heaney has also suffered from the conflict between his cultural․ political ideals which are fundamentally Ireland-centered and the political reality of the violent IRA (Irish Republican Army) which kills even civilians at random for the cause of nationalism. To Heaney the religious faith was a recognition of the deep value of the religious ritual and the Catholic ritual has been internalized in his feminine poetic sensibility of patience, humility, duty, discipline, guiltiness, grace, wonder, and the ritual supplication. The Irish religious identity he put an emphasis on was not the visionary mystic one of Yeats but the real one which has been internalized in the minds of the native Catholic Irish as “self-afflicting compulsions” and spiritual paralysis, especially in terms of political martyrdom complex in IRA and historical defeatism of Catholic priests in Northern Ireland. Both Heaney and Yeats opposed violence of nationalism and sought their ideal one. Religion has had a devastating influence on the two tribal struggle in Ireland so that the two poets refused the established Christianity and tried to enhance Irish republican nationalism to the genuine nationalism allowing the peaceful co-existence of the two races living in Ireland. Heaney demythodized Yeats’s myth of the political martyrdom and denied the religious halo of Irish nationalism as well as the mythodized force in the history of the Northern Europe. His quest of democratic co-existence of plural culture in Ulster seems realistic and idealistic solution of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.