예이츠의 슬라이고와 엘리엇의 이스트 코우커

Abstract

Starting with a general assumption that poets and regions are closely connected, this study discusses the significance of specific locales in the works of Yeats and Eliot, who are at the center of “international” modernism beyond regional boundaries. This paper focuses on Yeats’s Sligo and Eliot’s East Coker, the places that they chose as their burial grounds, with the locales’ close proximity to their origins in mind. While examining their biographical details and letters related to Sligo and East Coker, and exploring how these regions are reproduced in Yeats’s poems and Eliot’s “East Coker,” we will find interesting points of comparison between the two poets. Yeats’s experience in Sligo County provides explicit settings and materials such as Sligo place names and mythic figures, and in his poems about Sligo, the literal and the mythical are mingled. In “East Coker,” however, Eliot explores more symbolic and metaphysical meanings evoked by the small village of East Coker, even with its casual or distinct associations with him and his ancestors. In addition, this study concludes with how the present ambience of Sligo and East Coker may function for the 21st century readers of Yeats and Eliot.