개성과개성과 탈개성의 융화가 낳은 『재의 수요일』

The Fusion of Personality and Impersonality in Ash-Wednesday

Not a few Eliot scholars accept Ash-Wednesday as a poem of the poet’s personal voice. But, as a whole, Ash-Wednesday turns out to be a text that doesn’t get out of Eliot’s characteristic literary world which had appeared in his earlier poems: “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, “Gerontion”, The Waste Land, and “The Hollow Men”. In particular, the Dantean and Biblical allusions, fragmented prayer-forms, and ambiguous voices characterize Ash-Wednesday as one of the major poems typical of Eliotic poetics. Especially the fragmented prayer forms, constituting each end of the sections Ⅰ, Ⅲ, Ⅳ, Ⅴ and Ⅵ of Ash-Wednesday, can be said to function in the same way that the mythic method does in The Waste Land. In Ash-Wednesday, Eliot’s personal voice, which is, no doubt, more apparent than in his earlier poems, does not dominate the whole text, but disappears into the other fragmented impersonal voices resulting from the above-mentioned poetic techniques or strategies. Ash-Wednesday, not a variant in Eliot’s poetic world, seems to be a text embodying the poetic principle which Eliot argued for in the “Tradition and the Individual Talent”: ‘Impersonal theory of Poetry’. In this point, the personal elements in Ash-Wednesday appear to contribute to the poetics of fusion of personality and impersonality.