역사적 변화와 폭력: 예이츠의 「레다와 백조」(“Leda and the Swan”)에 대한 이해

Abstract

Yeats began his career as a poet elaborating the Celtic legends and stories about the life and politics of the Irish people: Irishness was a source of his poetic inspiration. Later he moved to formulations that complicated his own attitudes toward his contemporary politics in Ireland and caused misunderstanding of his works among his readers. Because he emphasized violence embodied in the struggles of political conflicts and historical events. For Yeats, history steps to another stage with violence. In other words, he focused on the violent moment in historical events. In describing the process or movement of memorable event in history he distances himself and keeps his views or judgments on it with ambivalent words. He does not support for or oppose to the only one side in the political event, to show his interest in the significances of the moments. Thus he is far from the passionate politics in his contemporary Ireland. Rather he sees the violence as a power to change in history, as his poem "Leda and the Swan" shows. In the myth of Leda and Zeus he reads the destructive act of rape on Leda by Zeus within the frame of destruction of the nation-state. And Yeats focuses on Leda's tragic experience with powerful and violent Zeus as an event toward the violent and tragic history afterwards. In short, he shows the violence as one committed to change in the history of a state.