정철과 박목월 시에 등장하는 방랑자는 인간의 마지막 피난처인 자연을 향해 뒤도 돌아보지 않고 가는 사람들이다. 그런데 이들을 긍정적 시각으로 보면 이들은 자연에 매우 잘 순응하는 사람들이다. 동시에 부정적 측면으로 보면 이들은 자신들의 정체와 방랑하는 이유를 드러내지 않을 뿐 아니라 방랑의 원인인 갈등이나 억압에 대해 전혀 저항하지 못하는 극단적 도피자일 수 있다. 그러나 예이츠와 히니 시의 방랑자들은 그들이 누구인지 왜 방랑하고 있는지를 밝히고 저항한다. 예이츠는 앵글로 아이리시 영웅으로의 저항 정신을 그의 방랑 시에서 드러냈다. 이것은 자신을 오신, 쿠훌린및 오이디푸스 같은 영웅과 자신을 동일시 한데서도 증명될 수 있다. 이와 대조적으로 히니는 순례의 섬이나 방황하는 스위니를 통해서 종교의 권위에 저항해 나락으로 떨어져 방랑해야만 했던 전설의 순례자인 스위니와 자신을 동일시했다. 한편 한국 시와 아일랜드 시에 등장한 방랑자들은 모두 예술혼인 자유를 추구하는 공통점을 갖고 있다.
예이츠 이후의 시적 자세와 태도를 일견하면, 그의 시가 나중에 쓰여 지는 많은 시의 근거가 된다는 점에서 예이츠 이후의 시인들은 그의 그늘에 있다. 그가 황소고 그들이 개미라는 뜻이 아니라, 하나의 태양이 어떤 지형에 하나의 그림자를 던진다는 뜻이다. 그리고 같은 땅 내의 한 부분에서 일한다는 것은 하나의 개미의 그림자가 보다 큰 다른 개미의 그림자와 겹치거나 우연일치가 되며, 그의 그림자의 윤곽은 앞으로 보다 큰 그림자가 나타날 때까지 기준이 된다는 뜻이다.
Ireland abounds in narrative stories, including mythologies, sagas, legends and folktales, handed down through many generations from the ancient pagan period. In Ireland, especially in the western country Sligo where W. B. Yeats spent the better part of his early days, one cannot go far without hearing the mystic stories of pagan gods, nymphs and ghosts. The Irish are very proud of their unique and traditional Celtic culture and they still believe that the supernatural beings haunt everywhere and intervene in their human affairs. Yeats was educated in England and greatly influenced by many English writers and poets. Yeats, however, born with Celtic spirit and encouraged by the patriot John O’Leary, determined to be a national poet. Therefore, he began to write his early romantic narratives and dramatic verses based on the ancient Irish myths and legends, following the two brilliant predecessors Samuel Ferguson and William Allingham. Besides, what is more important than anything else, he usually put his own life and his unrequited love for Maud Gonne by modifying their themes and symbols into the ancient stories. Thus he succeeded in creating utterly new myths much familiar not only to the Irish today but also to the modern people abroad. Hence he was a renowned myth-maker and -modifier of the age
아일랜드와 우리 대한민국은 거의 같은 시기인 20세기 초반에 독립운동이 있었고 또한 20세기 중반이라는 거의 같은 시기에 공화국의 형태로 재탄생했지만, 아직까지 국토의 완전한 회복이 이루어지지 못하고 서로 다른 국가나 체제로 분리되어 있으면서 통합된 한 국가가 되려는 꿈을 버리지 못하고 있다. 아일랜드의 통합은 종교, 인종, 정치 문화적 색채의 차이점 때문에 우리의 통합보다 더 어려울 수도 있겠지만, 다른 한편으로는 800년 이상의 혼종화 현상과 이민 그리고 유럽연합으로의 정체성을 확장시킨 점 때문에 다양성을 수용함에 잘 훈련됨으로써 지역화와 세계화의 조화 속에서 그 갈등이 더 쉽게 풀릴 수도 있다고 생각한다. 대한민국의 경우는 단일 민족, 단일 문화 때문에 더 쉽게 통합될 가능성이 있으나 아일랜드의 경우와 달리 자유와 전제라는 극단적인 이질적 정치체제와 지역적 색채화만을 수용하려는 민족주의가 정치적 봉건화를 지탱시켜 세계화로부터 고립될 수 있는 위험성을 안고 있다. 또 다른 위험요소로는 통합의 과정에서 이루어지는 필수적인 사항으로 탈식민화을 위한 저항과 곧 이어 헤게모니 싸움으로의 내전이 수반될 수 있다. 이 논문을 쓴 동기와 목적은 요사이 회자되나 그 정의가 정립되지 않은 ‘통일’이라는 용어 등을 미래에 바람직하게 정의내릴 필요성을 느꼈기 때문이고 이것을 위해 거의 같은 상황 속에서 바람직하게 발전해가는 아일랜드를 연구해 우리의 문제점을 해결해 보려함에 있다. 아일랜드의 현대 역사는 영국과의 탈 식민전쟁, 그리고 내란으로 이루어지는 시기에 있어 다수인 게일 카톨릭이 과거 지배층인 소수 앵글로 아이리시를 패배시키는 과정, 그 과정에서 수반된 정치와 문화적 측면에서의 민족주의 강화, 그 후에 유럽연합의 일원으로 지역화와 세계화의 조화등으로 정의내릴 수 있겠다. 특히 이 논문에서는 앵글로 아이리시 계급에 속한 예이츠와 회복되지 못한 땅, 북아일랜드의 소수파였던 히니라는 두 시인이 탈식민과 내전에 어떻게 반응했으며 그들이 어떤 식으로 해결을 원했는가를 알아보기 위해 그들의 시를 다시 읽어보고, 한 국가 안에 존재하는 서로 다른 계급의 두 시인이 통합 아일랜드에 대해 지녔던 의견의 차이와 공통점을 찾아내어 우리의 가장 바람직한 통일론을 모색하려 했다. 그런데 두 시인의 가장 큰 공통점은, 종교와 인종면에서 지배, 피지배의 차이가 있을지라도 그 둘 모두 정치, 종교, 인종에 있어 자신들이 속한 공동체의 편견을 극복하고 문화적 공동기반을 다지려 했고 또 시인과 예술의 자유를 추구한 점일 것이다. 한편 그 둘 사이의 차이점은 그 방법론에 있었다. 예를 들면, 그 둘 다 종교와 인종의 편견을 뛰어넘으려는 의도로 조상의 뿌리를 켈트에서 찾을 지라도 아일랜드 자치국의 성립과 더불어 기울어가는 앵글로 아이리시에 속한 예이츠는 처음에는 카톨릭 민족주의 색채를 수용하지만 후기에는 기우는 신교 앵글로-아이리시의 문화를 옹호하려는 균형감각을 고취시키려 했다. 한편 히니는 처음에는 억압받는 북아일랜드의 소수파로서 영국에 저항하는 민족주의 색채로 출발할 지라도 민족주의의 과격성과 카톨릭 공동체가 갖는 편견과 폭력을 배격하고 양심공화국으로의 통합아일랜드를 역설한다. 결론적으로 두 시인은 정치와 종교, 인종의 차이가 강화시킨 배타성보다는 문화적 유대감을 강화시키려는 화해와 상생의 의도를 갖고 있다. 이 둘 모두 지배 문화인 영국을 완전히 배제하지 않으면서 자신들의 정체성을 미국, 유럽으로 확장시켜 그 국수성을 지양해 갔음도 알 수 있었다. 즉, 이 두 시인에게서 민족주의는 문화적 정체성을 확립하는 일에 역점을 둔 것으로 그 과정에서 호전성과 배타성보다는 화해를 통해 식민화에서 파생된 이질성과 혼종을 받아들였기 때문에 지역성과 세계화를 조화시킬 수 있었다. 마지막 결론은 우리의 통합에도 국수적 민족주의와 맞물려 있는 정치적 봉건성으로의 퇴보보다는 지역과 세계화의 기류 속에서 문화의 정체성을 추구함이 선행되어져야 할 것이다.
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.
Yeats’s imagination is filled with the deliberate efforts and will to transform the given reality and self. Influenced by William Blake’s visionary or symbolic imagination who had pursued the eternal essence of life, Yeats sought for the perfect and beautiful as the goal which human beings should try to reach. In ‘Adam’s Curse,’ he asserts, since the Fall, there are nothing perfect and beautiful without one’s deliberate labour to reach them. A good poem necessarily needs lots of repeated correction, “stitching and unstitching,” but finally if it doesn’t seem natural like “a moment’s thought,” all the efforts and labour which have been made comes to be futile. In that the naturalness in poems through laborious process is emphasized, it can be said that his poetics would seek to the perfect and the refined, in content and expression, but most of all his great concern is on one’s passion and the laborious process to transform the reality as it is through imagination. This paper aims to explore the achievement of Yeats’s transformative imagination acted on the idealization of Anglo-Irish aristocratic tradition and nationality in terms of the discourse of nationalism. He projects onto Anglo-Irish aristocratic class the intellectual leadership over the crowd and the organic continuity and tradition which Irish middle class, that he hates, is regarded to lack. Under the threat and violence of Irish Catholics who began to make claims to their rights on dispossessed land, the Anglo-Irish, who had enjoyed the power and wealth since the 17th century, were forced to feel crisis. The Anglo-Irish were destined to play no more active roles in the following Irish history and would be in danger of isolation. Thus his idealization of the Anglo-Irish was constituted where his desire and fear meet. Here Yeats’s idealization of Anglo-Irish aristocrat was made retrospectively in the crisis. The Gregorys’ Coole House and Yeats’s tower, Thoor Ballylee are representative symbols in which he idealized the Anglo-Irish culture and its heroic tradition. The sense of form which Yeats found in the architectural form of Coole House as well as “courtesy” and “ceremony” in aristocrat’s life is one of the heroic ideals Yeats pursued throughout all his life. In poems dealing with this theme, we can see that he idealizes the Anglo-Irish culture and tradition by giving them the idealized heroic values such as the recklessness, intellect and courtesy, criticizing the rigid mind and snobbism of native middle class people who is indifferent to one’s spiritual value and imagination. This is the discourse of nationalism which insists on one’s nation’s innocent, continuous and self-sufficient attributes and proves its superiority to other nations. They would hide the fact that it is invented or constituted by purpose, assuming naturalness and making national myth a self-evident fact through various cultural discourses. But Yeats’s transformative imagination, as seen in ‘Adam’s Curse,’ puts great emphasis on one’s labour made behind to reach the ideal and the opposite to the reality, he lays bare his deliberate efforts of idealizing, not making natural by hiding and mystifying it. Here his poetry comes out of the typical discourse of nation. Like the Anglo-Irish ancestors who founded the magnificent house dreaming the ideal, Yeats himself who wrote a poem in the crisis of breakdown of the Anglo-Irish nationality by historical change and violence wanted to be memorized to his heir as a founder, “befitting the emblem of adversity.” In ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War,’ and ‘Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931,’ we can see that he makes the myth of Anglo-Irish nationality and at the same time demystifies or deconstructs it by showing that it is invented.
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.
This paper aims to explore the processes of poetic transformation of Ireland matter in W. B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney and compare the two poets’ characteristics of attitudes to Irish politics. Even though one does not have any idea of their poetic prepositions in their poetry, there can be some understanding of the relationship between each poet’s poetic material and his works of poem. Yeats and Heaney keep distances themselves from Ireland in their poetry as a man does to woman. Some critics’ attacks that the contamination of literary discourse by political statements points to the poetics of Yeats and Heaney, and those attacks are resulted from the notion of the identification of woman with the land, which are the characteristics of these two poets. To the tradition of romantic love poems Yeats admires the Ireland and its people and transforms them into a sort of mythology. That is to speak that love poems and patriotic poems are blended in Yeats. With this point of view one feels in reading Yeats’s poems the period after the Easter Uprising of 1916, like “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” or “Easter 1916” and “September 1913,” a terrible new beauty that changes the old political and moral landscape. He struggles to question the situations caused the bloody violences and sacrifices. With this questioning he mystifies the imagined or ideal community. The essential Yeatsian themes and attitudes sound through the earlier works of Heaney. He draws an analogy between the preserved bodies of human sacrifices in the peatbogs of Denmark and corpses on the streets of contemporary Northern Ireland. And He employs gender stereotypes and myths to describe the violent and depressive situations in Ireland in his poems. Sometimes he uses myths, whether of apocalypse or sacrifice. But he always takes a questioning stance toward the power of mythic signification. In “The Tollund Man” the speaker comprehends the transforming and eternalizing power of myth and he also recognizes that power as a ‘blasphemy’ because it averts his, and the reader’s, eyes away from the specific victims and from the horror of the individual violent act.With this focusing on the individual victims, Heaney gives voice to those victims who can no longer speak, not silencing their individual voices on favour of a single voice and eternalizing their mythic power.