월트 휫먼과 T.S. 엘리엇

Walt Whitman and T. S. Eliot: Their Religious Sensibility and Poetry

The Bible is the sources of the poetic visions of Walt Whitman and T. S. Eliot. Their poetic visions, however, are quite different from each other, not only because of the differences of the religious backgrounds of their own inner worlds. but also because of their own religious sensibility. Whitman was born in a Quaker family and Eliot in a Puritan family which had turned a Unitarian, but their own religious sensibility was more instrumental in making their poetic visions similar and different. Their religious sensibilities were nurtured by their reading of the Bible, but their understandings of it were so quite different from each other. While Whitman had faith in man’s divinity and sang of the unity of body and soul, Eliot believed in man's sinfulness and illustrated the disunity of body and soul. The similarities and differences of their poetic visions were formulated by their religious sensibilities. The differences of their poetic visions gave birth to the different poetic techniques, but their similarities lie in their ultimate goals to find their identities and reach God. While Whitman, regarding sex as divine, stands naked proudly before God the Elder Brother as a Young Brother, Eliot, regarding sex as the source of original sin, humbly kneeled down dressed as a sinner before God the Lord.