T. S. 엘리엇과 로버트 로월－문명과 불만족

Abstract

T. S. Eliot was the most influential poet in the first half of twentieth century British and American poetry. Actually, a number of poet were under the influence of his poetry and poetics to the extent that some critics say he constructed his own poetic government. In the mid-century American poetry, however, it was Robert Lowell that created a revolutionary poetics against that of T. S. Eliot. In his early poetic career, Lowell himself also was a follower of T. S. Eliot, publishing a couple of collections of poems under the influence of the latter. Lowell's Life Studies, published in 1959, was a ground-breaking work which challenged the so-called Eliot’s poetics and championed his own poetic cause. Despite their huge poetic differences, they have many things in common in terms of their criticism of civilization and culture. First of all, they recognized human civilization and culture as corrupt and infertile; thus, they did not find any optimistic future in civilization that human beings have constructed. Many heroes in their poems are regarded as victims of civilization and culture in which they live. Eliot’s heroes in his early poetry manifest his attitude toward modern civilization; those of Lowell's Life Studies are expressed as victims in similar way. This paper seeks to analyze those victimized heroes in their poems.