브라우닝의 시에 나타난 시인의 사회적 역할:「얼룩 옷을 입은 해믈린의 피리 연주자」와「당대인에게 비친 모습」을 중심으로

Abstract

The identity and role of the poet in a society was a life-long question Robert Browning explored from his early works to late ones. This study aims at investigating the social role of the poet or artist as it is portrayed in “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” and “How It Strikes a Contemporary” which have been rarely discussed in detail by Browning critics in terms of this important issue. A dramatic lyric based upon a medieval German legend, “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” portrays the ambivalent role of a poet-artist in a medieval bourgeois town, who simultaneously delivers it from the pest of rats and destroys it by abducting its children. However, the closure of this fairy-tale presents an image of Utopian society beyond the “prison” of bourgeois materialism. In contrast, a dramatic monologue set in a nineteenth century Spanish town, “How It Strikes a Contemporary” describes the life and death of a poor unknown poet, who walks daily through the town to observe everyday lives of the people and to report them to the “King” in heaven. He is an example of “the objective poet” expounded by Browning in his “Essay on Shelley.” The socially alienated image of the poet-artist in these poems inherits and modifies the Romantic legacy of the ‘poet-prophet-priest,’ a symbolic figure of the residual culture distancing itself from the dominant materialist culture of the bourgeois society.