Folklore and Nationalism in Yeats and Sowol: Nation ...

The Yeats Journal of Korea/한국 예이츠 저널 Vol. 39 (2012): ***-***

Folklore and Nationalism in Yeats and Sowol: Nation as an “Imagined” and “Melancholy” Community* 1)

Ilhwan Yoon ____________________________________

우리말 요약: 식민주의의 억압 하에서 예이츠와 소월은 문학과 민족의 정체성을 연계 하여 민족정신을 다시 불러일으키려 한다. 두 시인은 신화와 민담에서 민족의 정신적 인 근원을 찾아내고 이를 시에 담는다. 예이츠는 정신적 힘을 지닌 신화와 민담을 통 해 아일랜드를 “상상의 공동체”로서 창조한다. 반면 소월은 신화와 민담에서 식민주의 에서 고통 받는 민족의 고통을 실제적으로 환기시킴으로써 역설적으로 민족의 정신을 고취한다. 주제어: 예이츠, 소월, 민담, 상상의 공동체, 우울증, 민족주의, 탈식민주의 저자소개: 윤일환, 부산대학교 영어영문학과 교수. ____________________________________

Title: Folklore and Nationalism in Yeats and Sowol: Nation as an "Imagined" and "Melancholy" Community Abstract: Under the yoke of colonization, both Yeats and Sowol seek after the link between literature and national identity, and found in myth, folklore, and symbolic landscape a subject ideally suited to express their respective efforts towards discovering a national character and spiritual foundation. Yeats favors myth and folklore imbued with spiritual power and creates Ireland as an “imagined community” as opposed to Sowol who, on conceiving a sense of spiritual deprivation in myth and folklore, substantially locates the nation’s suffering under colonial state and paradoxically animates national spirit. Key words: Yeats, Sowol, Folklore, Imagined Community, Melancholy, Nationalism, Post-colonialism Author: Yoon, Ilhwan teaches at Pusan National University, Korea. [email protected] ____________________________________

* This work was supported for two years by Pusan National University Research Grant.

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I. Folklore and Nationalism

Under

the yoke of colonization, both William Butler Yeats(1865-1939)

and Kim Sowol(1902-1934), one of Korea’s most beloved and well-known poets, seek after the link between literature and national identity, and found in myth, folklore, and symbolic landscape a subject ideally suited to express their respective efforts towards discovering a national character and spiritual foundation. For them, literary production plays an important role in establishing the reality of a national identity and making it ‘visible’ through their representation to the colonized population. Using symbols, Yeats and Sowol are likely to forge the social, psychological and affective-sentimental link among individuals; by enacting a variety of literary practices, they enhance the history’s signifying potencies and cohere reality into historical sense. They repeatedly center on how to locate, bring in, and inscribe ancestral or sacred history and territory especially by resorting to folklore and poetic landscape. In their literary practice, Yeats and Sowol endow folklore and landscape with national meaning in the special characteristic portrait of the native land. By redirecting collective cultural memories, they thus identify a historical fact of domination, and fiction discursive spaces. In those spaces where historical antinomies could be reconciled, both poets articulate their intervention as an effect of resistance. In regards to national identities Yeats substantially relies on the operation of a comprehensive and coherent system of symbols, as opposed to Sowol who struggles to create a core of national identity, despite keenly recognizing the absence of any master symbol to forge national identity. Yeats favors myth and folklore imbued with spiritual power and creates Ireland as an “imagined community”. Sowol, conceiving a sense of spiritual deprivation in myth and folklore, substantially locates the nation’s suffering under colonial state and paradoxically animates national spirit. While both poets try to create a cultural nexus around which various forces can congeal to resist colonialism, they also offer violent and irresolvable conflict behind such a nexus. Their assumption of a national identity does not fall into a national

Folklore and Nationalism in Yeats and Sowol

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essentialism; their turn to myth, folklore and symbolic landscape contains ambivalent struggle between their efforts at cultural unity and the uncontainable problems of nation, modernity, tradition, and the role of culture. This paper aims to examine the ambivalent relationship between nationalism and myth and folklore in the works of Yeats and Sowol. It attempts to demonstrate two distinct interplays between cultural repossession and national consciousness.

II. Yeats: Imagined Irish Community Yeats’s cultural nationalism comes to the surface as a response to the “crisis of representation” in which the Irish had sought, for centuries in vain, to see themselves mirrored and represented in the society around them(Lloyd 6). The crisis was partly rooted in the imperial Britain’s assertion of its own image as the superior and the Irish as the inferior. The British had normalized and valued hierarchy between modern, cosmopolitan, masculine Britain and primitive, agricultural, feminine Ireland. In its justification of the colonial project, the British had acted to justify the privilege over Ireland and allowed the consciousness of an injustice. Yeats resists such the normalization and hierarchy, evoking the British imperial devastation of Ireland. Against the colonial power that attempts to justify its rule, he allegorizes Ireland as a bleeding and rock-enchained youth in “The Two Titans”(1886) and in The Wanderings of Oisin(1889). He highlights, among their most important contexts, the British suppression of Ireland. During the time that Yeats wrote those poems, one of the most powerful movements for political reform was the Home Rule movement which Charles Stewart Parnell made a reality rather than an aspiration.1) With Parnell’s inspirational leadership, the Irish had been able to voice their demands so

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effectively. But because of his affair with a married woman, Parnell was gone in body and in spirit, which caused the Home Rule movement to fracture. After the rapid decline and death of the Irish leader Parnell in 1891, Yeats feels that Irish political life lost its significance and “the moment had come for work in Ireland . . . that for a time the imagination of young men would turn from politics”(E&I 488). The vacuum left by politics might be filled by literature, art, poetry, drama, and folklore. Through these, Yeats undertakes to construct a national identity to help Ireland attain the independence it has been fighting for. Through cultural revival, he tries to turn a corpselike Ireland into a living “imagined community”. Yeats’s cultural nationalism can be well illustrated by relying on Benedict Anderson’s “imagined community”. Anderson defines the nation as an imagined political community: I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is

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imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.

Anderson argues that national identity is here as a ‘communion’ which can only be one of the imagination. If one feels he belongs to a nation, it cannot be because he has face-to-face relation with its members. And yet, as Anderson goes on to say, there is an undeniable ‘reality’ to this imagined communion: It [The nation] is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited


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imaginings. (7)

The nation emerges through people imagining themselves to be part of a collectivity as communally bound. This is constituted, for Anderson, through the agency of print, the map and museum, the census, and so on. One’s sense of belonging to the nation is mediated by a complex set of symbols and events that cohere within the temporal rhythm of clock and calendar. Yeats in his 1903 essay on the Golway Plains writes about the shared “imaginative possessions” of the Irish people: “There is still in truth upon these great level plains a people, a community bound together by imaginative possessions, by stories and poems which have grown out of its own life, and by a past of great passions which can still waken the heart to imaginative action”(E&I 213). The people are bound together by imaginative possessions and narratives. Yeats attempts to create Ireland as an “imagined community” which is based upon discursive anchors such as narrative, myth, and symbol. The community not only involves territorial, geographic boundaries, but also possesses a psychological, economical and cultural basis. This may be due in large part to the perception of the Irish people as solid “political imagined communities” which represent Irish cultural nationalism. This is intricately tied to anti-imperialist and nationalist struggles, exploring the complexities inherent in the discourse of Irish nationalism. Striving for Ireland’s independence, Yeats needs to construct a true Irish culture without English or other influences. Yeats finds its possibility in Irish myth and folklore, which were suppressed by church doctrine and British control of the school system. He associates the industrializing British with utilitarianism, rationality, and imperialism. Against these he tries to marshal the opposing forces that he associates with peasant myth and folklore. As early as in the 1890s Yeats and his fellow intellectuals set to define Irishness in essential terms through literature: “Hyde, Yeats, AE, Synge and Lady

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Gregory, each wanted, though each used different words to express his intention, to de-Anglicize, to de-provincialize Ireland and to make it live again in all its individuality as a Celtic country, different in race, in traditions, in ancestral glories from the neighbouring island that had looked, not only across, but down on it for so long”(Reynolds 383). Myth and folklore contain universal values and belong to the common heritage, since they have been passed down from one generation to the next for centuries. Yeats writes: “Folk-art is, indeed, the oldest of the aristocracies of thought, and because it refuses what is passing and trivial, the merely clever and pretty, as certainly as the vulgar and insincere, and because it has gathered into itself the simplest and most unforgettable thoughts of the generations, it is the soil where all great art is rooted”(Celtic Twilight 139). Folklore is untouched by the materialism and still maintains contact with the mystery and imagination that existed before man fell a slave to the external world. Myth and Folklore for Yeats are indeed the tool for an “imagined community” with which to open the Celtic past, make it pertinent to the present, and thus create a great art rooted in the soil of folk-belief. He seeks to advertise the lushness and myth of the national landscape and drives the folklore back in the Celtic past in order to collectivize national anguishes and aspirations. Yeats clearly desires a unified Irish state and culture. He appeals to the aestheticization to fulfill his desire, metamorphosing the ‘real’ into an ‘aesthetic’ and ideal Ireland. In “Poetry and Tradition” Yeats speaks of his view of nationalism in a way that highlights the connection between politics and the imagination. Speaking of the poet Lionel Johnson and the political orator John F. Taylor, he remarks, “That ideal Ireland, perhaps from this out an imaginary Ireland, in whose service I labour, will always be in many essentials their Ireland”(E&I 246). Yeats uses myth and folklore in an attempt to embody an ideal Ireland which is divided between class, religion, language, and politics. There are conflicts between opposing factions; Unionists and


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Nationalists, Catholics and Protestants, English and Irish, and the rich and the poor. The Irish has been differentiated by the English, but in Ireland conflict also exists between Catholics and Protestants. Yeats’s early turn to peasant myth and folklore is partly in response to this tension. He tries to resolve or circumvent the tension by aestheticizing the Irish history and by using myth and folklore to locate the indisputable core of an Irish identity. Yeats retells entire folktales in epic poems and plays, such as The Wanderings of Oisin and The Death of Cuchulain, and frequently integrates references to myths and folklore, including in shorter poems, such as “The Stolen Child” and “Cuchulain’s Fight with the Sea”. Other poems deal with subjects, images, and themes culled from folklore. In “Who Goes with Fergus?” Yeats imagines a meeting with the king of Irish legend, Fergus who was both brave and wise to give up his political ambition in exchange for the wisdom of the Druids. In “The Song of Wandering Aengus” he captures the lovelorn god Aengus who grew old in search for the beautiful maiden. Yeats also references the natural landscape of Irish legend and myth, even if it sometimes does not include a specific place name. The imaginary natural worlds like Faeryland or Tir na nOg provide a compliment to both the general and specific treatments of Irish nature. Other works evoke events and locations in the city of Dublin, or Irish holy sites and historic places such as Tara, St Patrick's Purgatory and the Rock of Cashel. Yeats highlights the Irish country, towns, people and culture. For example, in “The Lake Isle of Inisfree”, “Tower”, “Coole Park And Ballylee, 1931”, “Under Ben Bulben”, he treats a particular Irish place to give expression to the spirit of a whole nation in a highly artistic form. “The Stolen Child” provides an excellent example of Yeats’s geographical and cultural repossession of his homeland. This poem comes from Irish folk in which Yeats edited: whenever a young child disappears or dies unexpectedly, supposedly faeries have lured the child’s spirit away from a

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human world and taken it to faery land. The “stolen child” motif itself forms a moment of resistance because it not only originates from a period before the English conservatorship of Ireland, but it also delineates a space in which one can escape the oppressive realities of the colonization. As Deane asserts about the faery land: From the beginning . . . there was an intimate connection between [Yeats’s] political vision of Ireland and occultism. The ‘kingdom of Faery’ was, in his view, a natural part of the old civilization which English Puritanism and its Irish middle-class Catholic descendant had destroyed”. (142)

The poem describes the world of faeries in terms of a wonderful exotic natural world(‘moonlight’, ‘grey sands’, ‘wandering water’, ‘rushes’, ‘star’, ‘ferns’, ‘young streams’), which gradually entices the child. In the final stanza, fairies lure the child away from his home who enters the land of the fairy realm. The child’s entering the fairy land means his escape from the forces of repression and stratification beyond the purview of the colonizer: Come away, O human Child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand. . . . (CWP 17)

Being stolen by faeries promotes a space where escaping boundaries and constraints of the colonizer is possible and unobstructed. Moreover, this space to be occupied is an infinitely Irish space, for it is created wholly from Irish fable. “The Tower” shows us brilliantly how Yeats sustains national cultures, and produces cultural links with the peasantry and the Anglo-Irish tradition. The Thoor Ballylee tower in the poem becomes the site where cultures are


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juxtaposed, intersected, and articulated through history. The poem begins with the poet’s decrying of the absurdity of the contrast between his old body and his vigorously alive imagination. He walks to and fro on the top of the tower and looks out over the countryside. He then explores the tower’s history of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy and its relationship with the surrounding landscape. By “sending imagination forth”, he attempts to escape the isolation of the tower in space and history. The poet desires to reach out imaginatively to the indigenous community beyond the tower, and to weave together the tower’s history and the narrative from the indigenous traditions. The poet in part 2 recalls a Mrs. French whose servant, knowing her wishes well, once cut off the ears of a rude farmer and brought them to her on a covered dish. He then retells another episode in his youth. Some men had celebrated a beautiful young girl in a song. Some men, elated with drink and song, sought her out, and finally one man drowned in a bog. The two episodes demonstrate the power of language and the imagination capable of causing destructive passions. After claiming that he himself created Hanrahan twenty years ago, he turns to the tower’s ancient inhabitants not only to develop cultural mixtures through history but also to bring cultural differences together in the tower. Before the tower went to ruin, some men of action dressed for war came to the tower and climbed that narrow stair. He links all these men to what he calls ‘the Great Memory’, a storehouse of symbols and images from the past. According to Yeats, the symbols belong partly to the Memory and partly to us. Because the Memory can be evoked by symbols, the poet can shape cultural ideas by modeling artworks on the images and symbols in the Great Memory. After mentioning the tower’s ancient inhabitants, he questions all those

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figures from the past Mrs. French, a local beauty, the man drowned in the bog, and Hanrahan: “Does the imagination dwell the most / Upon a woman won or woman lost?”(CWP 201). With the question, Yeats expresses his grief

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over the woman lost in his life. But more important he acknowledges his disillusionment of a total identity or synthesis of the different cultural traces. Composing those different cultural traces within the poem, he acknowledges that such composition often relies on “woman lost”: he constructs a cultural place from what is lost, that is, from what he no longer possesses. His repossession and recreation of the cultural traces do not reach the ideal identity, for to come too close to it would destroy the ideal itself. Since the imagination dwells the most upon a woman lost, culture for Yeats is essentially open and hybrid while always provisional and contested. He translates the tower’s history and the indigenous folklore history into the metaphorical space of cultural mixture. But the space is inevitably tied to the perpetual repossession and recreation of them. Bhabha’s claim about the people’s history is to the point: The present of the people's history, then, is a practice that destroys the constant principles of the national culture that attempt to hark back to a “true” national past, which is often represented in the reified forms of realism and stereotype. Such pedagogical knowledges and continuist national narratives miss [in the words of Fanon] the “zone of occult instability where the people dwell.” (152)

His cultural project endlessly remains suspended in the promise. It announces for the future what cannot be achieved in the present. In part 3, Yeats draws up his will to bequeath his pride to his inheritor: “I declare / They shall inherit my pride, / The pride of people that were / Bound neither to Cause nor to State. / Neither to slaves that were spat on, / Nor to the tyrants that spat”(CWP 202). His pride is not political, or tied up with slaves or tyrants, but that of Grattan and Burke. It is as refreshing as an unexpected shower, as poignant as a swan’s last song. His pride, which is bound not to any binary opposition, is characterized by its suddenness and


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unexpectedness that disrupt the totalizing web of an identity. Like his pride, Yeats’s creation of a hybrid form of culture will anticipate the possibility of the radical otherness that cannot be subsumed by any fixed referential and representational images.

III. Sowol: Tradition and Modernity It is really not until the 1920s that the first important works of modern Korean poetry emerge, including Sowol’s first and only collection of poems Azaleas(1925). Evidently the 1920s during the Japanese colonial period, especially after the failure of the March First Independence Movement, is experienced by the number of Korean poets as a point of rupture, as a crisis. They respond to the crisis generally in the two different ways. One group is lyric poets who bring into the realm of poetry the colonial status of the Korean people and the tragedy of losing national sovereignty. Poets like Kim

김억)

Ŏk(

research for new forms of poetry by returning to the past in

reaction to fledgling industrial capitalism during Japanese colonial period, without imitating Western models prevalent then in the Korean literary world. Kim Ŏk believes that the establishment of a truly Korean poetic form should come from a study of folksong that evinces the artistic creation of the people. He attempts to write modern poems in folk-song style, expressing representative feelings of the people (lost love and the sorrow of parting). Though the work of Kim Ŏk is seminal during the formative period of modern Korean poetic forms in the 1920s, however, there are several limits in his poetic forms: obsessed with fixed meter and form, he fails to attain a genuine folk-song rhythm; he uses conventional rhetoric, stock figures and metaphors, failing to represent the inner experience of the people; and he simplifies emotion and suppresses his concern for realism.

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백조) group

The other group responding to the crisis is the White Tide(

who tends to be nihilistic and romantically decadent, escaping from unpleasant realities to find an idealized beauty in death or places that exist on the other side of reality. The poets take up theme such as the vanity of life and the allure of the grave. There are whiffs of the exotic, morbid that one associates with the Decadents. They regard the everyday existence as frustrated or transitory, looking for an escape into beauty that exists principally in the

이상화) is a place not

imagination. For example, the bedroom of Yi Sanghwa(

only of rapture but of death. Death for him is not an end but the beginning of a leap to true life. Between the two roads of Kim Ŏk and Yi Sanghwa, Sowol takes neither of them faithfully. On one hand, he certainly pursues the folksong style that his master and teacher Kim Ŏk has opened, but he adapts the music and tone of folksongs much more skillfully than his master in simple and haunting rhythms, thereby making his poems come directly to the hearts of Koreans. Though one source of his appeal, as a critic argues, may be “little specificity of plot,” “Images [that] are commonplace,” “conventional feelings about the sorrow of love”, and “calculated indeterminacy”(Peter H. Lee 353), Sowol’s poem rarely creates stock responses to readers. In sequence of the musical rhythms it often evokes complex emotions combined with sorrow, resentment, obstinacy, self-reproach, isolation and absence. He is engaged but never overwhelmed by folksongs, deliberately disassembling them in order to create a new form of modern poetry. Unlike Yi Sanghwa, on the other hand, Sowol does not find in death or some secluded place a deeper reality and a strange new beauty. He is never entirely submissive to lost love without obstinacy, never losing hope of seeing the beloved. Neither is he indifferent to realities, despite a lack of references to modern urban life and of direct engagement with Korea’s colonial situation. He deals with painful realities during Japanese colonial period. For


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example, he poignantly expresses a hardship for displaced people who have lost their farmland after it has been taken over by the Japanese, in such

바라건대는 우리에게 우리의 보섭대일 땅이 있었더라면) and “The Song on Namuribul”(나 무리벌 노래). He also retells darkness of colonial life in “Spring, Spring Night, and Spring Rain”(봄과 봄밤과 봄비), which laments hardship inflicted on Chosun people, and “Spring”(봄), which contrasts gloomy realities and poems as “Only think, If We Had Our Land, Our Own to Plow”(

lively spring. In the face of the colonial reality, Sowol does not helplessly lament but expresses his opposition to the Japanese presence and oppression.

제이. 엠. 에스) in memory of Jo Man Sik, a

For example, he writes “J.M.H”(

prominent nationalist leader of the Korean independence, who was Sowol’s

인종) he expresses “preparationism”(준비론), which

teacher. In “Submission”(

implies that Chosun people should equip themselves with the skills and knowledge in preparation for their distinctive roles in the independent Korea.

물마름) Sowol introduces folklore about General Nami and

In “Water Plants”(

Hong Kyung Rae who “raised the flag of justice high”(Azaleas 117) in order to inspire a spirit of national resistance. Accepting neither strict folksong movement nor decadence, Sowol cannot also reconcile himself to the colonial modern. The colonizing Japan introduced many modern economic and social institutions, and invested in infrastructure, including schools, railroads and utilities; it had transformed traditional precolonial societies and cultures into modern civilization and cultures. The process of colonial modernization, however, aggravated the economic condition of average Koreans; it also led to the spiritual impoverishment of the modern subject, who was left unmoored in a world defined by psychological alienation and social displacement. Sowol had lived on the horizon where the tradition and the modern intersected. He was forced to enter the realm of colonial modernity as an inevitable process of social formation. While attracted to the allure of the modern, he witnessed

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Japanese’s domination and exploitation of Korea. The gap between the mirage of modernity produced by modern schools, railroads, and utilities and its consequences created split in his inner consciousness, torn between his refusal to be assimilated himself to the colonial modern and impossibility to return to the past that had been blind to social reform, cultural enlightenment, mass education, and Western science. Sowol’s speaker thus often stands at the hybrid and border place that intersects across tradition and modernity. The world around him is a strange and uncanny home where he feels no longer at home. As wondering vagabond, he cannot find any way to run away from the present colonial

서울밤), the speaker,

reality into the rich escape of the past. In “Seoul Night”(

marking the electric streetlights in modern city of Seoul, brings “The far distant night skies” into “my heart’s secret place”. Asking “How we like the streets of Seoul! / How the Soul nights please us!”(Azaleas 68), he as an outsider of the city turns to the dark recesses of his mind, seeking his native soil. For him, the homeland is represented only in the form of a dream or as

고향)

a memory. The speaker in “Hometown”(

does not reflect upon his

hometown during the daytime, but only in the dream is he able to arrive at

삼수갑

his rich and beautiful land and soil. His posthumous “Samsu Kapsan”(

산) describes the speaker’s impasse caught deep in Samsu Kapsan, a literal

and literary remote place away from home. He left his hometown for Samsu Kapsan but could not come back. “I long for home, but Samsu Kapsan / Is my prison. / No way back”(McCann 54). The poem implies that though denying his traditional home for the modern world, he finds himself in the confinements of the modern city(Nam 231). Sowol’s longing for home is important, for home is “the foundation of identity as individuals and as members of a community, and the dwelling-place of being. Home is not just the house you happen to live in; it is not something that can be anywhere, that can be exchanged, but an irreplaceable centre of significance” (Relph 39).


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“Samsu Kapsan” reveals the dilemma of the colonial subject who resists his assimilation to the colonial reality but without any alternative and without any possibility to return home. He is radically divided and alienated, constantly wandering between the two paths. The split subject, however, paradoxically reveals its proper place that cannot be assimilated to the colonial system; it cannot be erased by the colonial discourse which is not willing to tolerate diverse voices and wandering. The other voice (tradition) in the divided subject speaks itself, disturbing a totality of colonial discourse. As Homi Bhabha points out, “The ambivalence at the source of traditional discourses on authority enables a form of subversion, founded on the undecidability that turns the discursive conditions of dominance into the grounds of intervention”(112). Sowol attempts to do a various poetic strategies for cracking the colonial modern by reviving “all records of the ancestors”(Azaleas 134). He presents traditional customs and convention, retells folksongs and folklore, and sings incantation

널

as a part of a shamanistic ritual. “Seesaw”( ) and “the seventh day of the

칠석)

seventh month”(

describe the world of traditional customs and

conventions. The world, as irreducible culture, embodies the tradition in the modern, the non-contemporary in the contemporary. Folksong and folklore are also a means towards discovering the spiritual identity of Korea. For example,

춘향과 이도령), who are heroine and hero

in “Ch’unghyang and Yi Toryŏng”(

of the old narrative love story, Sowol reminds us of the time “long age and faithful to our land”(Azaleas 156), indirectly criticizing the colonial rule which took away the land that the Korean people had been faithful to. By utilizing the local names of places, and by using the backdrop of the local countryside, Sowol evokes the sanctity of land and a sense of tradition while inspiring the national consciousness of Korean people within the

산

confines of the reality of colonialism. “Mountain”( ), “Cuckoo”, and

왕십리) are good examples in which local names become raw

“Wangsimni”(

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material for poetic transformation into metaphors which come to stand for what is truly substantial in life. In “Mountain” Samsu Kapsan as deep mountain gorge “signifies the distance between him and his true love that he

진두강)

cannot bridge”(Lee, Hyun-Won 89). The Chindu River(

as the

background of a Cuckoo folklore represents it as the place haunted by keen

천안삼거리) symbolizes the

and poignant cry of agonies. Ch’ŏnan Crossing(

speaker’s standing at the crossroads of love and life.

무덤)

“Grave”(

provides an excellent example of Sowol’s ambiguous

strategy for reviving “all records of the ancestors”. Someone calling me, the sound here and there on the red hill the tombstones moving in the moonlight, while the song, the voice left of it, falls down around where all records of the ancestors lie buried. I look everywhere, but only the traceless song settles over, while here, and there on the shadowy hill the voice of someone who seems to be calling me, the voice calling, the calling voice trying to seize my soul and tear it out of me. (Azaleas 134)

The speaker is wandering looking for everywhere around the grave of the ancestors “here and there on the red hill”. Here the grave signifies “all records of the ancestors”. He has come here to the grave because the voice of someone seems to be calling him. It is the voice of the spirit’s calling, “the traceless song,” or “the song, the voice left of it” that tries “to seize my soul and tear it out of me”. The voice from the grave creates mutual understanding between the living and the dead through a kind of incantatory or magical words. The speaker experiences communion and oneness with the voice. The communion occurs “in the moonlight” and “on the shadowy hill”


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where only the spiritual world rules with all the orders of the real world retreating(O, Tae-Hwan 134). What is “the song, the voice left of it”? Whatever it is, it certainly leads the speaker to “all records of the ancestors”, which seem to include the folksong passed down orally from one generation to another, for Sowol wrote his poetry in a style reminiscent of traditional Korean folksongs. And whatever the voice is, the question is inevitably raised: if the voice is left of the song and if the song is traceless, then how is he able to bring the records back to life by providing the voice with (new) meanings? Since the song suffers invisibility that hardly indicates its former form, the reviving of it is always ‘refinding’ of it, that is, an interpretation as a transformation of the original. The refinding of “all records of the ancestors” is in fact a recreation of them, a recreation that functions aesthetically. The records support the transition between themselves and their aesthetic meaning in their absence.

접동새) gives a vivid illustration of how aesthetical recreation is

“Cuckoo”(

achieved. The poem retells the folktale of the cuckoo, which recounts the fable of a deserted and dead sister who is reincarnated into a cuckoo. Her stepmother, symbolic violence outside family, brings tragedy to the sister and “the nine younger brothers left behind”(Azaleas 157). Her voice speaks itself through repetition of Cuckoos. IIn retelling the folklore Sowol slightly changes its story in accordance with his poetic purpose. The original story tells us that the sister, who was hampered and abused by her stepmother, was died of illness just before her marriage. He represents the story in a more dramatic way by changing the cause of her death: in jealousy her stepmother locked her in the barn and set it on fire. The recreation renders the story so much better in spirit and aesthetically, capturing the nation’s suffering under colonial rule. Evoking suffering, he also presents the cuckoo as a guardian spirit for the nation, as “May I cry out, Sister?” suggests. The sister's spirit,

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Ilhwan Yoon

reincarnated in cuckoo, will never forget the nation of “the nine younger brothers left behind” even “at the hour / when other all are sleeping.” In a sense Sowol who sings his beautifully poignant poetry, is similar to the cuckoo that sadly cries “from mountain to mountain”(Azaleas 157). Another

초혼) expresses the desperate desire to invoke the spirit during an invocation ceremony, and “Azaleas”(진달래 꽃) captures the painful poem “Invocation”(

sorrow of separation by using the proper name of a local site. Sowol’s poems evoke the Korean peoples’ sense of ‘self’ which had been damaged following Japanese colonization. They also awaken the significance of folk literature that is founded upon tradition and indigenous character. By imparting image of universal feelings to native folklores, Sowol provides a point of references around which the Korean people may personally structure his or her emotional and spiritual reality. He aesthetically creates local folktales by tearing away what Shelley called the ‘veil of familiarity’ from the world, and thus making us look at them afresh.

IV. Yeats and Sowol: the Ambivalent Ideal of a National Identity Both Yeats and Sowol make use of their favorite intensifying device of myth and folklore but in different manners. By reviving the mythic power of Irish folklore, Yeats attempts to reproduce and reinvent its past glory and to return to the putative origins of Ireland. For Sowol, in comparison, the folktales rarely invoke the power of the spiritual but instead evoke the isolated, depressed, and poignant reality of his day. His description of the proper places culminates with its absence and dislocation often tinged with faint lights, colors, and outlines. The content of Sowol’s work contains the elements of native folktales and folksongs that express the deep sorrow and pathos for the unattainable virtues of fading love, the absence of a place of


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origin, and the alienation of the subject in a colonial reality. However different it may be, however, the ideal of a national identity that Yeats and Sowol dream of is one of their strategies to resist and disturb a structured set of concepts, assumptions, and discursive practices that were used to produce a hierarchy. Their strategies, of course, have risk falling into the trap that involuntarily repeats colonial discourse: by constructing a national identity, they may create dualistic oppositions and install a hierarchy. There are in their idea of a national identity, however, something that cannot conform to either polarity of a dichotomy between totality and absence. Their ideal seems to neither present nor absent; alternatively it is both present and absent at the same time. It cannot be characterized as either mere full presence or total absence, but rather which oscillates between these dual states. The ambivalent ideal also provides both poets with a source of subversion. The ideal is impossible because the very idealization marks our irrevocable separation from the real, here and how. Still, the ideal continues to exert its influence since it is the rock around which their attempts at national identity ultimately revolve. The ideal ensures both poets to continue to create the national identity. In Yeats’s “To the Rose upon the Rood of Time”, for example, the speaker attempts to symbolically achieve the essential Irishness: for him the rose signifies physical love, the legends of Celtic pre-history Ireland, and religion. He in the beginning addresses both the rose begging it to be with him while he sings the ancient Irish stories of Cuchulain and Fergus, and the “sadness” of eternal beauty that is nevertheless to be found “in all poor foolish things that live a day.” Yeats’s exploration into Celtic pre-history is to purify the Irish soul, which would be possible only if the Irish returned to a heroic past in which the nation lived in its pure and authentic form. As Eugene O’Brien writes, “by delving into Celtic pre-history, the political and historical divisions that had come to define the Irish situation could be elided

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and annealed into a mythic and heroic cultural archive which would allow people to take pride in their own culture”(128). In the second stanza Yeats modifies his prayer:

—

Come near, come near, come near Ah, leave me still A little space for the rose-breath to fill! Lest I no more hear common things that crave . . . (CWP 27)

He begs the immortal rose to come near and yet not to completely destroy the “common things.” The emphasis on touch (“Come near”) and life (“rose-breath”) in these lines indicates a need to maintain contact with the mundane world despite aspirations toward the metaphysical. While the speaker wishes to coexist in both worlds at once, however, he also realizes the importance of not being overwhelmed by the beauty of the ideal. The ideal can engulf his reality. His attempt to catch the ideal symbolically illuminates the danger of creation of Ireland as an “imagined community”. It helps him go beyond the accidental and contingent reality but can engulf and destroy the political reality of actual inequality and exploitation. The powerful imagination can obliterate his life in reality. Though the speaker prays for the rose’s breath to come near that he may reach the ideal, he is also well aware of its destructive power. Yeats himself said in his note to the poem that “the quality symbolized as the Rose differs from the intellectual beauty of Shelly and of Spencer in that [Yeats has] imagined it as suffering with man and not as something pursued and seen from afar”(VP 842). For Yeats human suffering in reality is the last bastion of defense from the destructive power of the imagination. It also functions as the intersecting point at which, while in reality, he could be in communion with the ideal. Ultimately human suffering in the poem does not conform to either side of the ideal or the real. The national identity Yeats tries to create is a product of being forever


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open to possibilities rather than taking a definitive position. In Sowol’s works, the distance in the ideal has a different implication. The poet often visions the ideal place as a shelter from the forces of repression and stratification under colonial rule. In such poems as “Red

붉은 조수),

Tide”(

무심),

“Detachment”(

바다),

and “The Sea”(

the speaker

admires the sea or the river as a strong and dynamic image; it is the very space of life and the space of generation. But the “sea,” which the speaker desperately wants to reach, is also the place he ultimately cannot reach; it is just the space in a dream that he cannot obtain in reality. The aspiration for a vital life in turn changes into the aspiration for death due to the absolute

삭주구성) also reveals an ideal place far

limit of the sea. “Sakchu Kusŏng”(

off in space. What the speaker continues to emphasize is the long distance to Kusŏng. Three thousand ri or six thousand ri do not simply the geographical distance but also a sense of absolutely unreachable distance in mind. His desperation becomes clear with concrete descriptions of steep and deep mountains. The degree of his longing for love increases the sense of distance from "Sakchu Kusŏng". Though even birds and clouds “come and go, back and forth” home(Azaleas 154), he is unable to return. Sakchu Kusŏng is a domain that initiates his desire consistently but keeps it unsatisfied. It is no wonder then that due to different ways to reach the idea, we find different moods of sorrow in the two poets. In “The Stolen Child,” Yeats retells the story of the faeries that tempt a sorrowful human child to leave the imperfect world of men for their enchanted yet somehow sinister secret places. In each of the first three stanzas the fairy voices describe the wonders of their world. Then in the fourth stanza they triumph. Yet, as the child winds his way toward the waters and the wild, the faeries describe the cozy human world the child has lost. The child’s mind is shattered at the thought that he shall never see nor hear the familiar sounds and voices of the earthly world. The same earthliness gives rise to Oisin’s sufferings of human

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sorrow in The Wanderings of Oisin. No amount of effort on Niamh’s part can mitigate Oisin’s personal sorrow and bring him to forget all the memories of the past. This is why Oisin is to part with Niamh, returning to the human world after all. Yeats seeks the realization of the ideal while he does not forget the real in his own ideal, since he knows very well that forgetting his reality means to risk losing his own identity. Human suffering for Yeats is thus a motivation that provides him with a secure place from losing the identity of himself and that of Ireland. Both the child and Oisin long for the human world, not because they cannot reach the faerie world to the point of no return, but precisely because they are too close to it. To come too close to the ideal threatens the personal and national identity itself. If Yeats conceives of Ireland as an “imagined community”, Sowol evokes isolation, exile, and dislocation under colonial rule. He has a wide range of feelings inextricably intertwined. Sorrow, lingering attachment, resentment, and self-reproach are often manifested in his poems all at once. The complexity may be best illustrated by ideas of Freud’s melancholy. According to Freud, the subject in melancholy becomes isolated, depressed, and experiences this loss of the other as the loss of oneself. The lost other is internalized into the pain-stricken subject, consequently dividing it from the inside. The melancholic act of internalization circumscribes the loss and sacrifices the self for its sake. The economy of the self becomes marginal in relation to the responsibility towards that which was lost. The absence cannot be replaced by anything, since no symbolic mediation will ever be sufficient, not even memory. The internalization of the loss presents an interior absence within the subject, turning the subject into the battlefield of separation. The division within the subject creates a space in which the ambivalence and hatred originally produced with regard to the loss, is turned towards the self. The melancholic reaction to the traumatic loss of a beloved is characterized by extreme self-devaluation, to the extent that the subject might actually believe


23

that one is responsible for the death or departure of the other. Or, conversely, the subject views him or herself as the abandoned object, having been “left” by the lost other, and might view him or herself as a victim, as the wounded or hurt recipient of this traumatic loss that the other has “imposed”(Freud 237-60). Sowol tells us a different mode of imagination than Yeats which is hardly threatening enough to engulf the reality and thus does not need human

진달래 꽃) reveals

suffering as a bastion of defense. His celebrated “Azaleas”(

complex feelings of sorrow in separation from his love. Said to have been influenced by Yeats’ “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven”, Sowol crafts the poem to be wholly indigenous to Korea’s shores. Its theme of departure and loss is much similar to that of the early Yeats, but with uniquely Korean

한

sentiments of han( ), or sorrow in separation. The speaker in the poem seems entirely submissive to his beloved who is about to leave him. He, however, would not let her go without an armful of azalea blossoms under her feet. Though he has no choice but to release her, he obstinately refuses the reality without her. But “the obstinacy and the resentment change into self-reproach, when he says, ‘though I die, no, not a single tear shall fall’”(O, Se-Yung 138). His self-reproach leads him further down towards desolation even more poignantly. His feelings cannot be presented as ‘this and that’ or ‘this or that.’ It is ‘and’ and ‘or’ at the same time. They have no proper or determinate character; rather, they are the possibility of love, resentment, obstinacy and/or self-reproach.

초혼), Sowol gives us a vivid

In another celebrated poem “Invocation”(

illustration of the sentiments of han. As the title implies the poem deals with the speaker’s desperate desire to invoke the spirit of his dead beloved. Mournfully aware of the irrevocable reality, he experiences an emotional breakdown, which leads him to exclaim, “O name I will die calling”. But he refuses to accept the death of his beloved, which is implied in his invocation

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Ilhwan Yoon

of the spirit. By invoking the spirit several times, he obstinately and persistently refuses the bitterness of the reality. Then his obstinacy turns into resentment at the absurdity that the death of his beloved brought about: “Even turned to stone where I stand on this spot, / O name that I will die calling!”. But this resentment in turn changes into self-reproach: “Even at the last I could not say / the one word left in my heart”(Azaleas 137). He blames himself for not professing his secret for her. The logic underlying this blame is that his beloved may not have been dead had he told her his secret. Here the melancholic reaction to the traumatic separation is expressed by extreme self-devaluation to the extent that he may actually believe that he is responsible for her death. The speaker’s feeling suspends the decidable opposition between love, resentment, obstinacy and self-reproach; it has a double, contradictory, and undecidable value. The several incompatible feelings are simultaneously expressed. Another attempt that Yeats and Sowol suggest for challenging the essential nationalism is closely related to how to trouble collective and shared memories in which nations are inevitably embedded. Shared memories are integral to cultural identity, meaningfully combining cultural diversity with unity, promoting a shared identity and carving the foundations of nations. The reappropriation of national identity creates a certain ‘fundamental experience’ which is likely to be rooted in the myths of common ancestry, shared historical memories, and tie of common culture. Since the cultivation of shared memories is essential to the survival and flourish of a nation, the nationalists repeatedly delineate the nation and (re)discover, transmit, and analyze its cultural heritage. Memory and forgetting in Yeats and Sowol, however, often function as an act of defiance undermining the economy of opposition and the discourse of totality. Their interplay in their works allegorically shows how both poets are neither faithful to nor transgress the national identity that collective memories bring about.


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먼 후일) provides us a way of how not

Sowol’s “Someday Long After”(

to forget but without interiorizing the genuine alterity of the other inside myself. The “you” in the poem is both the object and subject of love, be it the beloved or the nation. Reading “you” as the nation would reveal the complex interrelation between memory and nation: the unassimilated foreignness allegorically implies how the poet is faithful to collective national memories but without essentializing them. In the poem the speaker adhere to a paradoxical logic in which forgetting is never finished or resolved: Visit me, someday long after, and I might say I have forgotten. Blame me, in your heart, Missing you so, I have forgotten. Still blame me for all of that, Not believing you, I have forgotten. Today, yesterday, I did not forget you, but someday long after, I have forgotten. (Azaleas 15)

The most repeated and emphasized words here are the “I have forgotten”. Forgetting in the future is possible only on the condition that the speaker cannot forget her (read as nation) still today in the present. The first stanza tells us that he is going to remember her even in her absence (as “Visit me, someday long after” implies) until “someday long after”. It is he who has continued to remember her, and she who has forgotten him. When she visits him someday, he would say “I have forgotten”, despite his long and desperate missing of her. The second and third stanza explains why he would say he has forgotten and nevertheless thought over and remembered her. He knows she might blame him in her hear, hearing his “I have forgotten”. But

26

Ilhwan Yoon

his missing of her would be much stronger than hers, as “Missing you so” poignantly suggests. In the third stanza, the “for all that” apparently not only indicates her doubt and blame of his excuse but also points to the fact that he resents her for not returning to him. In the fourth stanza, the speaker implies that waiting would have become his daily routine, with unchangeable faith and endless memories. He says he will have forgotten her in the future when someday she might visit him. “But the day will never come, since it is just his assumption”(Yoon, Ho Byeong 153). She has already forgotten him long ago. Only he will continue to remember her “today, yesterday”, and “someday long after”. What sustains his desire of not forgetting is either the memory of his past love or the hope of his reunion with the beloved (nation). His hope moves within temporality under the form of an anticipation whose realization is perpetually delayed, though he may know that his hope to meet her is illusionary. His desire is never ‘here and now’ but always in a past or toward an endless future. He wishes to have the love that belongs truly to him. His refusal to forget is closely connected to the affirmation of his own true love. Because of the foreignness from his remembering, however, he cannot appropriate, subjectivize, and so contain her (metaphorically) and her love in himself. The repeated “I have forgotten” and the different reasons for forgetting (“Missing you so”, “Not believing you”, “someday long after”) indicate that there are some possible fissure in his remembering, and some discrete and separate infidelity inside himself. Remembering her contains such mixed elements as missing, doubt, and endless postponement which are not totally assimilated. Though it is only assumption, he does not exclude a difference and a heterogeneity from remembering and forgetting. He does not also leave out her unassimilated alterity by saying that however completely she might have forgotten him, she might visit him unexpectedly someday. Her alterity and foreignness in his remembering imply his faithfulness to and


27

respect for her as the other. The presence of the unassimilated her in her exteriority is prolonged inside his remembering. But this does not mean the exclusion of her from it entirely. If he refuses to engage with her, he excludes her foreignness from himself and hence prevents any transformative interaction with her. He does not close the future possibility of her sudden visit “someday long after”. He therefore does not conform to either mere fidelity (to) or appropriation (of national memories), but rather oscillates between these dual demands. Yeat’s “Easter 1916” is closely related to the memorialization of the revolution leaders who have been ‘transformed utterly’ by the blood-sacrifice in the Easter Rising of 24 April 1916. The Rising came to him as a shock that the members of money-grabbing middle class whom he had previously dismissed could rise to such a heroic stature as martyrs for a high ideal. He was both attracted and appalled by the Rising; he was overwhelmed by the mixture of respect and annoyance, grief and horror, which later permeated “Easter 1916”. The poem begins with a description of Yeats’s recent encounter with nationalists before the rebellion. Their superficial conversation is punctuated by “polite meaningless words”. Yeats then reflects on the victims’ lives. Though at times they had looked “bitter”, “abstract”, “ignorant”, “shrill”, and “vainglorious”, he asserts that through the events of “Easter 1916” the victims have “All changed, changed utterly”. In the third stanza he attempts to make a sense of the sacrifice and betrays a lingering ambivalence to it. While honoring the nationalists, he casts doubt on the necessity and plausibility of their sacrifice. His uncertainty and doubt are implied by the imagery of “a living stream” (life and change) and “a stone” (stillness, death, and immortality): Hearts with one purpose alone

28

Ilhwan Yoon Through summer and winter seem Enchanted to a stone To trouble the living stream. (CWP 183)

By comparing the hearts of the nationalists to a stone that troubles a living stream, Yeats is questioning and criticizing the militant and dogmatic nationalism, the revolutionary fixity and the inability of the nationalists to accommodate change: the long struggle of the nationalists has turned their hearts to a stone. The ambivalence is intensified by the poet wondering of questioning when all this blood-sacrifice might come to an end: “Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart. / O when may it suffice?” Yeats cannot wholeheartedly embrace the nationalist’s blood-sacrifice, not simply because he is reluctantly to approve their revolutionary violence, but more importantly because he is well aware that nations often inspire profoundly self-sacrificing love. Nations, conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship, often entice their subjects to sacrifice for his father land: as Carolyn Marvin remarks: “The nation is the shared memory of blood sacrifice, periodically renewed. Those who share such memories often, but not always, share language, living space, or ethnicity. What they always share and cultivate is the memory of blood sacrifice. In totem myth, the felt or sentimental nation is the memory of the last sacrifice that counts for living believers. Blood sacrifice is a primitive notion. We define as primitive those processes that construct the social from the body. Since every society constructs itself from the bodies of its members, every society is primitive”. Nationalism is embedded in peculiarly absolute abstraction of death, which becomes a potentially generalizable experience, and national subjects identify themselves with the nation as formalized anonymity by their sharing in this experience. That Yeats recognizes the danger of aestheticized anonymity in a passionate sacrifice is emphasized with the question, “What is it but


29

nightfall?”, the qualification, “No, no, not night but death”, and finally his continued questioning of the nature of their deaths: “Was it needless death after all?” and “what if excess of love / Bewildered them till they died?” These questions imply his reluctance to bring the motifs of their deaths to settlement in the national cause. The reference to “needless death” reveals Yeats’s uncertainty as to the necessity of the Rising. And the “Bewildered” implies the excess of passion and the lack of sense and reason. Paradoxically in their deaths the poet recalls the inassimilable particularity and finitude of this death, and the absoluteness of an irrecuperable loss. Yeats’s gesture against such ideological abstractions of death is similar to that of Jean-Luc Nancy who puts forward a notion of existence as “unsacrificeable”: existence resists the process of abstraction and anonymity. While the imagined community denies the irreducible singularity of death by glorifying and monumentalizing it, Nancy considers death and existence as the absolute singularity and irreparability of loss. Nancy writes: “there is no ‘true’ sacrifice, that veritable existence is unsacrificeable, and that finally the truth of existence is that it cannot be sacrificed”(38). While Yeats honors the nationalist’s ability to transform themselves and the history of Ireland, he also resists invoking their deaths’ universality, reducing them to abstraction or formalization for the national loss too readily. This ambivalence is reflected in his closing statement. He affirms both the need to write and to cross out imagined community at once: I write it out in a verse MacDonagh and MacBride And Connolly and Pearse . . . (CWP 183)

Yeats writes each nationalist name by name in verse, creating an incalculable and incommensurable death. It is the radically other death that cannot remain

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Ilhwan Yoon

abstract and anonymous on the level of generality. By attending death which is always inappropriable and inimitable, he commemorates those nationalists in their absolute alterity. Yeats goes on to confirm the significance of their sacrifice in that “Whereever green is worn, / Are changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.” He commemorates the nationalist’s ability to instigate change in their individual lives and in the Irish people and to initiate Ireland's coming of age. But the oxymoron “terrible beauty” implies Yeats’s reservation and interrogation about the commemoration. Confirming the beauty of the self-sacrifice, he cannot ignore the terrible side of it. Yeats’s mixed feelings towards the self-sacrifice of the nationalists indicate that his relationship to the revolutionary nationalism is not straightforward or easy one. His complex and divided response to the Easter event is marked by the ambivalent hybridity of his colonial status. Celebrating the revolt of his compatriots, he casts doubt on the revolutionary fixity that demands self-sacrifice which reduces death to aestheticized abstraction and anonymity of the nation.

V. National Identity: Both Created and Displaced Yeats and Sowol, though in different ways, present a hybrid and ambivalent space in which the national identity is both created and displaced. Their ambivalent cultural unity, which is often constructed by the myth and folklore, suggests a mode of resistance against imperial discourse that creates dualistic oppositions and privileges the colonizer over the colonized. Both poets in their writings thus encourage a rethinking of nationalism and resistance that above all stress the ambivalence or hybridity. Instead of imagining the fixity or irreducability of the national identity, they reveal that the identity is ‘narrative’ constructions that arise from the hybrid interaction


31

of contending cultures, be they Catholic and Protestant, or modernity and tradition. Yeats and Sowol, questioning the supposedly homogeneous and innate national and cultural identity, dramatize the interstitial space that is forever open to possibility and in which total identity can never be brought about.

Notes 1) Charles Stewart Parnell(1846-1891) was the leader of the Home Rule movement that campaigned for Ireland to become a Federal state while remaining part of the Union. This would enable Ireland to make decisions on Irish matters away from the British Parliament. Parnell’s demise came about through an affair he had with Mrs. O’Shea who had practically broken up with her husband then. The Catholic population of Ireland would not forgive Parnell under grounds that the "divorce case revealed Parnell as a man of low moral character" (O’Hegarty 588). Parnell's fall from power following an adulterous scandal would be regarded by Yeats as a signal instance of Irish ingratitude.

Works cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London & New York: Verso, 2006. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge,1994. Deane, Seamus. A Short History of Irish Literature. London: Hutchinson, 1986. Freud, Sigmund. "Mourning and Melancholia". The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. XIV. Ed. J. Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1957. Kim, Sowol. Azaleas: a Book of Poems. Trans. & Intro. David R. McCann. New York: Columba UP, 2007. ___. The Complete Works of Kim Sowol. Ed. Kim, Yong-Jik. Seoul: Seoul National UP, 2007. Lee, Hyun-Won. “The Meaning and Aspects of ‘Place’ in the Kim Sowol’s Poetry”. Sanghur 17 (2006): 79-106.

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Lee, Peter. H. “Early Twentieth-Century Poetry.” Ed. Peter H. Lee. A History of Korean Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. Lloyd, David. Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Movement. Durham: Duke UP, 1993. Marvin, Carolyn & David W. Ingle. Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag. New York: Cambridge UP, 1999. McCann, R. David. “Korea the Colony and the Poet Sowŏl”. War, Occupation, and Creativity: Japan and East Asia, 1920-1960. Ed. Marlene J. Mayo, J. Thomas Rimer, H. Eleanor Kerkham. Hawaii: U of Hawaii P, 2001. Marvin, C. & Ingle, D. Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag. New York: Cambridge UP, 1999. Nam, Ki-Hyeok. “The Modern and The Anti-Modern Consciousness in Kim So-Wol’s Poems”. The Korean Poetics 11 (2004): 219-61. Nancy, Jean-Luc. “The Unsacrificeable.” Yale French Studies 79 (1991): 20-38. O’Brien, Eugene. The Question of Irish Identity in the Writings of William Butler Yeats and James Joyce. Lampeter, Wales: Edwin Mellen, 1998. O, Se-Yung. “Logic of Han and its Paradoxical Distance: Han and Nature in Sowol”. Language, Literature, and Criticism 3 (1978): 129-46. O, Tae-Hwan. "Communication with Souls or Literary Layers of Shamanistic

―

Factor Shamnaistic Imagination in the Poetry of the Poets: Kim, Sowol: Lee, Sang; Baek, Suck". International Language and Literature 42(2008): 203-41. P. S. O’Hegarty. A History of Ireland Under the Union (1801-1922). London: Methuen, 1952. Relph, Edward. Place and Placelessness (Research in Planning and Design). London: Pion, 1976. Reynolds, Lorna. “The Irish Literary Revival”. The Celtic Consciousness. Ed. Robert Driscoll. PortIaoise: Dolmen, 1981. Yeats, William Butler. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats. Vol. 1: The Poems. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. New York: Scribner, 1997. (Abbreviated as CWP)


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___. Essays and Introductions. New York: Macmillan, 1961. (Abbreviated as E&I) ___. The Celtic Twilight:. New York: Dover, 2004 ___. The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W. B. Yeats. Eds. Peter Allt and Russel K. Alspach. New York: Macmillan, 1966. (Abbreviated as VP) Yoon, Ho-Byeong. “The Secret Place and Methodological Conflict in the Poet: The Indetermainate Dialectics In Kim Sowol.” Korean Language & Literature 106(1991): 147-69.

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