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ISSN : 1226-4946(Print)
ISSN : 2288-5412(Online)
The Yeats Journal of Korea Vol.24 pp.57-80
DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.14354/yjk.2005.24.57

Visionary Landscape in Coleridge and Yeats

Ilhwan Yoon

Abstract

Although Yeats declares himself as "the last romantics," it is highly controversialto situate him in the romantic tradition inaugurated by Coleridge's and Wordsworth'stheories of the imagination. It is my argument that whereas the romantics often takesthe natural landscape as referential and as a means for visionary ends, Yeats makes useof the same landscape to bring divine voices into existence. Among the greatromantics I take Coleridge for my argument, since like Yeats he directs his endeavorsto the supernatural. In Coleridge's "The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem," thenarrator attempts to articulate the experience of nature in an unmediated form, withoutprojection of one's desire onto nature. He attempts to vision of the harmoniouscorrespondence to nature first in "gentle Maid" and then his baby. The questionremains open, however, whether a perceived harmony expressed in the poem is alsolimited and confined by the fragmentary view of the narrator himself. In "Frost atMidnight" the narrator finds himself cut away from the outside world. As an answer tohis emptiness he projects onto his son the harmonious state in which the outer worldcorresponds to the inner world of the child's feelings. The narrator's dependence upona futuristic vision leaves the question of whether the vision is an expression of anepiphany of the truth perceived or merely a projection of his desire to escape his beingdisconnected from the outer world onto his son.
Vacillation between perception and imagination, which often occupies Coleridge'spoetics, suffers much shift in Yeats who with much hesitation turns his attention awayfrom complex dialectic between mind and nature or from choosing one over the other.A part of The Wandering of Oisin shows us well that the image of the shell there isonly a mirror for a dream which is no longer that of the shell but the subjective dreamof the poet's imagination. To the extent that the shell is a thing in nature, however, the image remains in essence natural, But Yeats already attempts to escape the dangeringrained in the fusion of the perceived object and the perceiving consciousness intoone as early as in 1990. In "The Symbolism of Poetry," Yeats makes it clear that hissymbol is not simply to evoke its inexhaustible traditional meanings but an intangiblereality of the divine essence. Yeats intends to write divine voices into existence and torediscover the long-unity between man and the gods. Yeats's poetics will be allegoricalbecause the meaning of the symbol is revealed by a key and this key is given as thedivine order itself. But it may be realistic in order to make certain that the symbolswill be easily recognized and read. This is explicit when Yeats openly tells us that anatural object in a landscape is also to be read symbolically as in "Coole Park andBallylee, 1931" where Yeats makes the divine symbol fit neatly within the picture ofthe concrete scene as well as in the network of the symbol. His main purpose for thenatural landscape here is to constitute the divine symbols and gain their deeperstructural unity and most of their intellectual content by writing divine voice intoexistence, by recording the signals that reach him from a divine realm.

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