예이츠 시에 있어서 아일랜드의 현실과 정치의 문제 = The Question of Irish Reality and Politics in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The main purpose of this thesis is to examine how Yeats's opinion of the Irish middle class and revolutionists was expressed in his poems. We can realize Yeats's participation in Irish reality and politics, and his limitation as an Anglo-Irish writer by studying the relationship between Yeats's political beliefs and his poetry.
Yeats's interest in fascism, his insistence upon the superiority of Anglo-Irish tradition, mode of expression and ambiguity in his literature works, and his exclusive vision of Irish society which denied Catholic Ireland and middle-class, have laid him open to many attacks from the nationalists and the middle class, whose commercialism rejected the noble spirit of national heroes and values of good art. Even today, there are a number of critics and Irish people who have estimated Yeats as a writer who looked away Irish reality and politics.
But it seems to me that what we see him as a writer who didn't contribute to the Irish nationalism movement and as a nonpolitical poet is wrong. Though he did not reflect Irish reality and politics in all his works, he incessantly tried to express them and to write Irishness in his work with the subject matter from Ireland under John O'Leary's influence. The course of his artistic life was intertwined with the history of his country. It seems to me that his concern of nation with his political passion continued all his life. He advises Irish Young writers to develop Celtic culture and to have a concern of Irish subject matter in "Under Ben Bulben" regarding as his dying wish's poem.
Yeats criticized the commercialism of the middle class and he yearned for Aristocracies who have made beautiful manners in "At Galway Races" and "These Are the Clouds". He expressed his ambivalent opinion of revolutionists in "September 1913". After the Easter Rising caused to change Yeats's thought for the Irish nationalism movement, he simultaneously showed us his criticism and sympathy for Irish revolutionists in "Easter 1916". Also he described his active support for them in "The Rose Tree".
Yeats tried to de-Anglicize Ireland by rejecting commercialism and writing about Irish themes in English. But his cultural nationalism largely freed from the real world. And it is true that there are a lot of limitations in that his cultural nationalism was supported from the native Irish in Irish reality and that Yeats was rightly estimated as a great nationalist by his backgrounds-race·religion·culture, support for Ascendancy, attack on the middle class's philistinism, and the ideology of nationalism and Irishness in those days.
Neverthless, I think we should revaluate Yeats as an Irish nationalistic writer, because he made a brilliant contribution to having the Irish people take an interest in their present questions and pursue the de-Anglicization detached from commercialism, based on national consciousness.