예이츠와 엘리엇 사이의 관계 규명을 위한 시도는 있었지만 좀처럼 그 해답을 찾지 못하는 것처럼 보인다. 이 글은 이 두 시인 사이의 관계 규명을 위해 기획된 것이다. 그래서 먼저 엘리엇과 예이츠 비교 연구의 의의와 이 두 시인 사이의 첫 만남에서 시작하여 예이츠와 엘리엇 상호 간의 평가와 마지막으로 엘리엇 작품 속 예이츠의 투영 모습을 고찰했다.

이 논문은 예이츠 희곡 『캐서린 백작 부인』 과 『배우 여왕』 두 편을 중 심으로 시인과 여주인공과의 대립을 연구한다. 연구의 첫 단계로 『캐서린 백작 부인』 에 등장하는 시인 어릴과 여주인공 백작부인의 대립을 분석하고 이를 통해서 이 조합 이 다른 예이츠의 대립 유형과 비교하여 갖게 되는 차이점과 그 원인을 밝혀본다. 그 다음 단계로는 희곡 『배우 여왕』의 시인과 여주인공의 대립을 비교 분석하여 시인과 여주인공의 조합만이 가지고 있는 특징들을 밝혀낸다. 결론으로써 여주인공과의 대립에서 보여 준 시인의 모습이 통상적인 예이츠가 그리는 시인의 모습과 다르게 보일 수 있지만 그럼에도 그것이 객관성보다 주관성을 우위에 두는 예이츠의 생각을 벗어 나는 것이 아니라는 것을 주장한다.

시는 기이하여 우리를 울고, 미소 짓고, 웃게 하거나, 우리를 행복하게 혹은 불행하게 하며, 평범한 것을 특별한 것으로 혹은 익숙한 것을 낯설게 한다. 어린 아이에게 시를 가르칠 수도 있지만 가르치는 것이 불가능하다는 것도 사실이다. 시는 태어날 때 가지고 태어나지만 자기와 다른 시에 작동하는 것들과 접함으로써 시인의 마음과 지력이 예민해진다. 본 논문은 세 시인, 셰익스피어, 예이츠, 파운드의 시적인 특징 몇 가지를 다룬다. 이 시인들은 비슷하다기보다 전혀 다르지만 공통점이 좀 있다. 각자는 자신의 시대를 반영하고 자신의 시대가 요구하는 시를 빗는다.

This paper investigates the images of landscapes in the poetry of W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot, the two greatest poets of the last century. Facing landscapes of the present world and the ancient as well, using his imagination, Yeats maximizes the poetic quality in his poetry. Some of his favorite landscapes, for example, include Innisfree, an islet in Sligo, Thor Ballylee in Coole Park, Byzantium, which delineate clear-cut images of his poetic themes. Either Yeats lived in Sligo with his mother's parents in his childhood, stayed in Lady Gregory’s house in the Coole Park, and owned and lived in the tower, Thor Ballylee in summer; or he admired the old Byzantium that he idealizes in his supreme poems. They serve as optimum metaphors for his poetry, making his poetry simple but rich in its imagery. On the other hand, Eliot focuses on delineating the life of modern man in his poetry by using cities, including London, Boston, Paris, and St. Louis. The people of the cities are being described as faithless and purposeless with their mind void. His depiction of the city further represents the whole modern civilization. The big city is the backdrop of such infertile imagery of modern man.

“All noble things are the result of warfare; great nations and classes, of warfare in the visible world, great poetry and philosophy, of invisible warfare, the division of mind within itself" said Yeats. Warfares between thesis and antithesis, whether visible or invisible, lie at the heart of Yeats's poetic world, enabling the poet to create the enormously powerful poetic text. In “Meditations in Time of Civil War”, both visible and invisible warfares are overlapped each other, intensifying the division of the poet's own mind, revealing the bitter agony of the poetic self to criticize and remake itself. This poem dramatizes a story of the poet's self-criticism and self-recreation through the warfare between History, the Irish Civil War, and the poet's dream as a cultural nationalist to re-establish and preserve the Irish identity. In “Ancestral Houses”, the poet dreams to redeem the eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish aristocratic ideals for making the unitary Irish mind, only to realize its impossibility. In “My House" through “My Descendants”, the poet seeks to re-establish the Irish identity in his own sanctuary, Thoor Ballylee, through the poetic task to break “the symbolic rose" into flower, only to fail in it, for he has excluded and suppressed History, the Irish Civil War, from his mind. The poet's dream is broken up. In “The Road at My Door" and “The Stare's Nest by My Window", the poet encounters the Civil War face to face, struggling to transform its violence and bitterness into ‘sweetness' and pursuing his dream once more, but it's far from being realized. In “I see Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart's Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness", the poet internalizes the violent and bitter Irish historical realities through his vigorous imagination, severely criticizing himself as a solitary Platonist and remaking his poetic self a more solid one. In “The Tower", written next to this poem, we can meet the enormous power of his recreated poetic self.

W. B. Yeats began to write his works when Ireland was struggling for its independence from England. Young Yeats hoped to be a national poet and was naturally concerned about the future of his fatherland. The way Yeats chose for his country was a cultural one, not a military or political one. He believed in the Irish people’s artistic sensibilities and believed that his country could be a healthier and better country than England through the ’Unity of Culture’. Yeats was attracted to drama because of its usefulness as a public art. He wanted to establish a national drama based on Irish folklore and myth. He believed that drama could achieve or revive the ’Unity of Culture’ which he equated with the national unity of Ireland. Yeats’s main idea was that to achieve ’Unity of Culture’, the support of common people for art would be essential. Yeats’s early play, The King’s Threshold shows the unity of the poet and common people well. The story is based on an Irish myth. The king, a man of action, banishes Seanchan the poet, a man of words, from his court (affairs of state) and the poet choose to die on a hunger-strike for his rights in the court, that is, for the value of art in society. The poet works for the common people and expects their support, of which the king is much afraid. The King’s Threshold dramatizes the theme that concerned Yeats so deeply, the role of art in society. And another main point of the play is that poetry transcends politics. Yeats satirizes the defects and deficiencies of a society which no longer recognizes the artist’s role. But the poet dies, and we are not shown any effect that his death may have had on either society or the individual. The modern Irish people were not what the young poet had expected. Though the young poet’s dream for the ’Unity of Culture’ may be naive, the play shows us Yeats’s view of art and his belief in the poet’s role in society.

In this paper, through appreciating one of W. B. Yeats’s later poems, I try to find how the poet’s creative self gets to have its creative power and in what mechanism it expands its poetic circumference. “Among School Children” is the very poem his poetic self and creative imagination are well wrought into. In the poem, the poet suggests that power and knowledge cannot exist together, speaking of the powerful theories of Plato and simultaneously of the philosopher’s powerless being before Nature. He praises Aristotle as a king of kings, and Pythagoras as world-famous golden-thighed, but he mocks them of being old clothes upon an old stick to scare a bird. In the same way, he asserts that “the body is not bruised to pleasure soul.” In the sense of deconstructionists, all the binary oppositions have their hierarchies; however, Yeats puts the two antithetical elements on the identical level, as they are not subordinated to each other, and tries to bridge the abyss or space between. Such an attempt to unite the opposite worlds is manifested in his A Vision. Concerning his “gyre” theory, the figure is frequently drawn as a double cone. The one is called primary gyre, representing space, intellect, mask and fortune; the other antithetical one to represent time, emotion, creativity and will. The narrow end of each cone is in the centre of the broad end of the other. Seen at the narrow end of each cone through the centre of each broad end, appears a circle having a dot at the center. This is the poet’s world of imagination whose centre is his “self” and whose circumference is the limit of the self’s perception. The poet’s life-long activities are related with his efforts to expand the circumference. “Among School Children” is a trace of such activities. The centre is the place where the self of the poet is located; the circumference is where the self “perceives its limitation,” or where arises the feeling of awe, terror, or ecstasy, which means a kind of tension geared between the binary opposite worlds: the finite and the infinite; the mortal and the immortal; life and death; the real and the ideal; youth and age; the body and soul; pleasure and despair. The perception network of the poet connects the centre and circumference. The power to widen the circle originates from the poet’s paradoxical sense of life, of deprivation, and of renunciation through an attainable love with Maud Gonne, tensions between religious struggles, civil revolutions, and so on. The sharp confrontation of these tensions takes place rise to in the circumference and stimulates the poet’s creative imagination. This power of self strengthened by these tensions starts its quest-journey to explore the mysteries beyond the limit of its circle: the mysteries of the opposite worlds separated here and there. The ultimate purpose of the journey, finally, is to reach the united condition of the two worlds, which means what Greg Johnson calls “the highest imaginative enhancement of human identity” or immortality. This united world is the place where “we cannot know the dancer from the dance” and where Yeats’s “unity of being” is synthesized.

The criticism of T. S. Eliot shows an extraordinary lack of interest in what literary works actually say. Its attention is almost extremely confined to qualities of language, styles of feeling, the relations of image and experience. With Arnold, however, the emphasis is on substance rather than on form. Such emphasis led him into his attempted definition of poetry as criticism of life. In like manner, Leavis also emphasized that poetry be in serious relation to “Life,” have a firm grasp of the actual, of the object. If we may call Eliot a poet as poet, either Arnold or Leavis can be rightly labeled a poet as preacher. These two contrasting attitudes are illustrated in their criticism on such Romantic poets as Wordsworth, Shelley, and especially Keats, where the difference is most distinctly manifested. Though Eliot, in his later poems and essays, have passed on to other problems including the relation of poetry to the spiritual and social life of its time, he has never derailed himself from considering poetry primarily as poetry, not as any other.