제1차 세계대전 이후 “유럽의 발칸화”에 대한 엘리엇의 진단과 처방

T. S. Eliot’s Diagnosis of and Prescription forthe “Balkanisation of Europe” after the First World War

This paper explores how T. S. Eliot(1888-1965), as a poet and as a critic, diagnosed the aftermath of the first World War as the “Balkanization of Europe” and prescribed the “tradition” embodying “the mind of Europe” for the split of Europe into separate nations especially after the Treaty of Versailles. The first section discusses seemingly contradictory but complementary roles of the poet and the critic by comparing a poem “Gerontion” with a prose work “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” both published around the time when the treaty was signed (1919.06.28). The second section shows how the poet illustrates the split of Europe without any possibility of mutual communication: he diagnosed the situation and re-presented it as a “heap of broken images” or “these fragments” in “What the Thunder Said” of The Waste Land (1922). Parallel to the second section, the third section examines how the critic and editor of The Criterion(1922-1939.01) tried to build up not political or economic but literary, cultural and religious solidarity among separate European nations till after the second World War when he re-claimed the ‘unity of European culture.’ The last section comments on the limitations of Eliot’s Euro-centric response and recent Anglo-American studies on this issue, introducing two different interpretations of Eliot’s diagnosis and prescription by his contemporary Korean writers―Jae-Sou Choi and Ki-Rim Kim.