W. B. 예이츠의 후기 시와 신체중심 신인간주의 - (영혼)과 (육체)를 포월(匍越)하기 -

Abstract

It is generally accepted that there are fierce conflicts between two opposing forces, that is, body and soul, eternity and transience, ideal and reality, etc. In the later poetry of W. B. Yeats, Yeats himself, however, was against the body-soul(or mind) dualism that the human mind and soul are entirely distinct. The Western society has long assumed that the soul is superior to the body. Yeats seems to have overcome this powerful dichotomy and even put more emphasis on the body than the soul especially in his later poetry. I would call this body-centered attitude to the human-being “new” humanism. In this context, we may turn to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a French philosopher of phenomenology, who returned to phenomena and the body. He argues that the body will carry with it the intentional threads linking it to its surrounding and finally reveal to us the perceiving subject as the perceived world. The aim of this paper thus is to read the later poetry of Yeats again in terms of Merleau-Ponty’s discourse on the body as a locus of both human perception and action. If we reread closely some of Yeats’ later poems in this perspective, we may come to the unexpected conclusion: in the poems such as “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop,” the body is more reliable and meaningful than the soul. It is significant to look closely at what is implied in the rediscovery of the body in reality and human life in Yeats’ later poetry.