미완의 신화

Abstract

Among English Romantic poets there occurred successively paradoxical thoughts named later as pleasure principle and reality principle by Sigmund Freud. When we understand their changing thoughts, we can find a useful way to read Keats’s poetry properly. John Keats also expresses this paradoxical thoughts in two letters dated of December 22, 1817 and April 15, 1819. In the first letter, he seems to aim at pleasure principle when he compares Adam’s dream with imagination. And in the second, he takes reality principle into consideration when he says ‘the vale of Soul-making’. We know by these letters he experiences the paradoxical situation that his first thought of transcendental idealism blooms into the second thought based on the imperfect reality. He, like other Romantic poets, shows us this paradoxical spiritual shift from pleasure principle to reality principle. The present paper examines this spiritual development of Keats’s through the analysis of The Fall of Hyperion, studies the process of his poetic autogenesis and soul-making, and tries to find a possible prospect of his whole poetry. By doing it in this way we can explain in a roundabout way the reason why English Romantic poets, including Keats, write a large number of unfinished poems. It is the myth of the Titans that the narrator in The Fall of Hyperion sees as a god sees in Moneta’s hollow brain, and for Keats myth is of the same imaginative order as the poets’s knowledge. Keats’s final myth or “system of Spirit-Creation” is a myth not of progress but of process, of self-becoming, of self-creation. In a chaotic, always changing world, a world without absolute orders, the individual must create his own meaning or self-identity out of his own intense participation in a living and dying universe. Therefore Keats goes on making a myth by writing poems, whether they are finished or unfinished.