워즈워스와 프랑스혁명: 『서곡』 9권에 나타난 보피의 정치교육 = Wordsworth and the French Revolution: Beaupuy`s Political Lesson in The Prelude Book IX

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This paper is yet another attempt to reconstruct Wordsworth`s radical past in the context of the French Revolution. Wordsworth stayed in Blois in the first half of 1792 experiencing the decisive moments of the Revolution such as the dethronement of Louis XVI, the September Massacre, and the power struggle between the Gironde and the Jacobin. Wordsworth`s political mentor during this period was Michel Beaupuy, a military officer sympathetic to the Revolution. According to The Prelude, Wordsworth is supposed to have become a republican reformer after a brief but fateful friendship with him. Wordsworth scholarship has made great efforts to confirm in more objective and reliable terms Wordsworth`s rather confusing and contradictory poetic recollection of his political initiation. Nicholas Roe`s Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years has been the most vigorous academic effort so far, which however has failed to offer any decisive hard evidence of Wordsworth`s political activities as a republican reformer. With a great respect for Roe`s honorable academic failure, this paper rereads a few key passages of The Prelude Book IX seeking for some new insights into Wordsworth`s radical years, particularly his political initiation in the contemporary context of the French Revolution. Wordsworth`s poetic recollections of those years are peculiarly camouflaged by his powerful rhetoric which is grandiose and hypocritical, repentant and self-defensive. With reference to the modern historical scholarship on this period, Wordsworth`s sparse recollection of his political lesson from Beaupuy still reveals that Beaupuy dealt with the most fundamental issues of the Revolution in a manner most suitable to a naive, unexperienced 22 year-old Englishman. Therefore, I argue that Wordsworth of 1792 was indeed initiated into a revolutionary reformism to become as radical as any other English reformer of those days, which was most decisively confirmed by his political pamphlet A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff written only a few months after Wordsworth`s discipleship.