“‘고통 받는 인간과 창조하는 마음’: 아더 홀럼, W. B. 예이츠, T. S. 엘리엇, 그리고 ‘순수한 영감’”

Abstract

As a young poet, Yeats believed that individual imagination was the paramount source of inspiration. His Romantic convictions were reinforced by Arthur Hallam’s claim that “pure” poetry came from the “impression on the senses of certain very sensitive men.” But he quickly recognized that a focus on the self might lead to solipsism. As an Irish Nationalist, too, he increasingly wanted his writing to engage directly with the world. Anxieties about where inspiration comes from, and whether art is merely autotelic, intensified in his work of the later 1890s, and led him to propose that genuine creativity required transcending the egotistical by accessing “universal thought.” He refined this proposition in his theorizations of the Mask and in A Vision, generating a neo-Romantic conception of selfhood as mobile, porous and shaped by the artist-mage’s powers. T. S. Eliot famously conceived of poetry as “not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” Yeats’s later formulations of poetic inspiration resolved the key tensions that had troubled him by acknowledging the artist as necessarily both finger and clay. In this early embrace of a Modernist notion of unstable, multiple selfhood, Yeats paradoxically became more fully a Romantic.