Yeats and Secularization in the Manuscripts of The Tower
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Defining the position of literary modernism within the larger narrative of western secularization is a difficult task. Some critics argue that modernism constitutes a radical break from inherited cultural paradigms and has thereby accelerated the decline of religion, or at the very least carried on the process of secularization; on the other hand, vestiges of spirituality and transcendence are found to be accentuated, rather than excised, in the works of writers such as Eliot, Pound, Joyce, and Woolf. How does one place Yeats within the context of the secular? There has always been a fascination with the occult, the hermetic, and the otherworldly since Yeats’s earliest work, yet the majority of readers would not describe Yeats’s most celebrated poems in exclusive terms of transcendence or spirituality. This paper attempts to contextualize Yeats within the process of secularization, assessing the strange mix of supernatural interest and immanent reality that coexist antithetically in his greatest poems. I will examine poems from The Tower (1928) as a summation of Yeats’s concerns in the 1920s. The period occupies a transitional phase within Yeats’s oeuvre in which the transcendent gradually gives way to the immanent. The manuscript materials of The Tower capture Yeats’s revisionary processes in reimagining the spiritual.
Abstract
Defining the position of literary modernism within the larger narrative of western secularization is a difficult task. Some critics argue that modernism constitutes a radical break from inherited cultural paradigms and has thereby accelerated the decline of religion, or at the very least carried on the process of secularization; on the other hand, vestiges of spirituality and transcendence are found to be accentuated, rather than excised, in the works of writers such as Eliot, Pound, Joyce, and Woolf. How does one place Yeats within the context of the secular? There has always been a fascination with the occult, the hermetic, and the otherworldly since Yeats’s earliest work, yet the majority of readers would not describe Yeats’s most celebrated poems in exclusive terms of transcendence or spirituality. This paper attempts to contextualize Yeats within the process of secularization, assessing the strange mix of supernatural interest and immanent reality that coexist antithetically in his greatest poems. I will examine poems from The Tower (1928) as a summation of Yeats’s concerns in the 1920s. The period occupies a transitional phase within Yeats’s oeuvre in which the transcendent gradually gives way to the immanent. The manuscript materials of The Tower capture Yeats’s revisionary processes in reimagining the spiritual.
참고문헌 (14)
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