패트릭 캐바나의 후기시에 나타난 희극 정신

Abstract

In renouncing The Great Hunger (1942), a masterpiece in which the revivalist ideology of W. B. Yeats is fiercely criticized in a realistic style, Patrick Kavanagh in his later years assumes for his poetic hegira a comic spirit that can be examined in two ways: form and content. Recovering from lung cancer in 1955 by the Grand Canal in Dublin, the poet uses the distinctive style of the urban pastoral in praise of God’s grace and love. As he sonnets the epiphany, he is no longer tied to reactionary anger against Irish literary revivalists but instead sings for the values of surrender and “not-caring,” through which he can embrace with loving arms the reality he once disparaged. In contrast with the tragic atmosphere pervasive in revivalist literature, which focuses primarily on heroic deeds of the doomed, Kavanagh underscores with his celebratory tone the significance of the simple lives of ordinary people. He also aspires to a utopian community, theorized as parochialism, in which the residents are filled with a sense of autonomy, unswayed by evaluation from outside. Despite their nationalist creed, the revivalists, however, anxiously depend on the judgment of British critics. Kavanagh’s comic spirit culminates in his humorous satire on revivalist ideology. Distancing himself from his earlier lambasting style in The Great Hunger as well as from Yeats’s dramatized solemnity, he evades all sorts of seriousness with his comic appropriation of Greek mythology and Alexander Pope.