영국 모더니스트로서 예이츠의 탄생: W. E. 헨리의 『내셔널 옵저버』와 19세기말 영국 문학장

Abstract

I attempt in this paper to reveal the profound influence the poet, critic, and editor William Ernest Henley (1849-1903) had on William Butler Yeats in the building of Yeats’s identity as an English Modernist. Yeats himself resisted acknowledging this influence in his Memoirs (1915-16) and Autobiographies (1927). This denial was part of Yeats’s myth-making of the Decadent poets of the Rhymers’ Club, which was necessary to develop further his own myth as a mature Modernist who had overcome the Rhymers’ solipsistic, jejune aestheticism. It was actually Henley’s ‘counter-aestheticism’ that provided logic for Yeats in his vision that mature art should not be in pursuit of mere beauty but power. By focusing on the critical weekly National Observer (1888-1897), which was first founded as the Scots Observer in Edinburgh and which Henley edited, I show that the ‘counter-aestheticism’ it promulgated in its ‘Literary’ section was intertwined with the ‘new’ Conservative elitism of its imperialist ‘Political’ section. This alloy formed the ground against which Yeats debuted in the British literary field; most of Yeats’s poems and prose works collected in Poems (1895) and in Celtic Twilight (1893) first appeared in that weekly. Through this weekly, Yeats was made an ‘Irish’ and Celtic poet whose poems could exemplify the ‘manly’ atavism which Henley saw as key to reviving the pan-‘English’ nation that was suffering from aesthetic and political decadence. The staunch Tory position of Henley as an opponent of Irish Home Rule remained a burden on Yeats so that Yeats would define the role of Henley as a mere editor of the journals where he happened to publish his works. The ‘masculine’ vitalist poetics of Henley’s own literary output, which emphasized the creative energy of poetical form and language, was, however, preserved in Yeats’s poems and ideas. Yeats’s poems in The Rose (1893), first published in the National Observer, receive special attention in relation to Henley’s The Song of Sword, and Other Verses (1892), which is noteworthy for its evolutionist sensibility of destruction and creation as well as its powerful images.