신동엽 시와 예이츠 시의 비교 연구

Abstract

SShin Dong-yeop and Yeats were active poets to explore creative methods based on the reality of the times, going through a turbulent period in history such as democratization in Korea and colonized Ireland, respectively. Despite some gaps in time and space, they share a couple of creative methods. This study set out to compare and analyze similar and yet discriminating characteristics between Shin's and Yeats's poems and shed light on their significance in the literary history. In their poems, both Shin and Yeats choose heroic figures demonstrating their ethnic identities as their poetic materials. Their heroes, however, show differences in reproduction patterns. In Shin's poems, heroic figures are embodied as the heroes of the people that lead a new history by combining with historical events exhibiting the autonomy and independence of the Korean people represented by the Donghak Peasant Movement, the March 1st Movement, and the April 19th Revolution. Yeats embodies his heroes as transcendent beings by borrowing heroes from the ancient legends and myths of Ireland. In his poems, the heroic figures provide the Irish an opportunity to rediscover their ethnic pride in the reality of a colony. In addition, he offers heroic representations in a broader sense by playing a variation to depict his heroic figures seeking eternal truth. Utopias reproduced both in Shin's and Yeats's poems belong to the time and space of the "past." The "past" that Shin calls a utopia in his poems has something to do with the ancient era including "Samhan," "Baekje" and "Northern Buyeo" as historical time and space that existed in reality. The ancient era reproduced in his poems is combined with the history of Korea and presented as a present time, showing a future image of the Korean people to overcome the negative reality of the times. In Yeats's poems, a utopia is the time and space of ancient Ireland's myths and legends or is reproduced as a mythical time and space represented by "Byzantium" created in his imagination. While the utopias reproduced in Shin's poems boil down to a historical space reflecting the distinct characteristics of the Korean people as the subject of the public, those in Yeats's poems show multifaceted variations. In his early poems with nationalistic tendency, a utopia is depicted based on the mythical time and space of Ireland's prosperous ethnic identity. His later poems present a universal utopia to achieve an artistic spirit. Shin created engagement poems that depicted the spiritual representation of the Korean people specifically and showed the historical awareness based on the people by reproducing people's heroes representing their ethnic identity and utopias that boiled down to the ancient era. His poems emphasized that the people, who were suppressed in history, should be the new subject of history, displaying an aspect of independent national literature. His poetic characteristics toward the distinct characteristics of the Korean people, however, have the risk of chauvinism inherent in them as Kim Soo-young was concerned. Yeats borrowed myths and legends based on the unique ethnicity of Ireland and recreated them anew, securing the universal nature of world literature while embodying national literature beyond the local features of Ireland. Compared with Shin's poems, however, his nationalistic poems have a limitation of providing no practical measures to target the issues of his reality specifically. Shin's and Yeats's poems based on materials showing an ethnic identity reformed the issues of Korea's and Ireland's literary circles, respectively, inclined towards political ideas in the unique historical reality of Korea and Ireland and proposed the classic examples of engagement poetry and nationalistic poetry that secured both literary values and the awareness of the times, thus holding their significance in the history of literature.