엘리엇의 초기시와 대중문화

T. S. Eliot's Early Poems and Popular Culture

Seung-Hyeok KweonModernism has been variously defined as a high art that is committed to the ideal of autonomous art, politically unengaged, or devoted to aesthetic goals. Thus, it has been invariably considered to be hostile to popular culture. Specifically T. S. Eliot has been regarded as one of the representative heroes along with I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis who defended modernism as a pristine and sacralized high art against the threatening pollution of popular culture. However, David Chinitz's, Ronald Schuchard's, and Loretta Johnson's recent studies presented ample evidence that Eliot had been attracted to the various forms of popular culture, such as popular music performed in Music Halls, comic strips, street slang, melodrama, sensational news stories, bawdy comedy, and so on. On the basis of their studies on his interests and enthusiasms for various lowbrow culture, this paper contends that his early poems cannot be characterized accurately by the apparently obvious cultural division between high and popular culture; rather they are peculiarly intermingled with both of high and low culture. As his writings on the dissociation of sensibility, the relation between feeling and thought, body and soul, appearance and reality show his complex and ambivalent attitudes, Eliot's early poems are his early attempts to incorporate them into his works of art and also reveal the same complicated and ambiguous attitudes toward high and popular culture.