시인의 자아와 시적 자아의 간격

Distance between Poets’ Self and Poetic Self in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot and Robert Lowell

The treatment of self in poetry has become the focal point of the poeticexpression, particularly after the rise of modernist poetics, mainly directed byEzra Pound and T. S. Eliot. The two sought to minimize the emphasis on selfin order to breed clarity of poetic expression, especially as a contrast to theabstraction of Victorian poetry. Such an effort was expressed in the imagistmovement as well as in the use of the objective correlative by T. S. Eliot. This essay examines the achievement of their attempt to transform poets’ ownself into the poetic self, compared with Robert Lowell’s manifestation of hisown self in his later poetry. Early twentieth-century European henomenologists such as Husserl, Sartre,Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty found intentionality in human consciousness, animportant working of self, thereby admitting the inescapability of the poet’s selfin his poetic expression. In a different perspective, post-modernists like Derridaand Lacan also recognized the self in human consciousness, which has beenshaped by the history and social environment of language; thus, they cast agreat doubt on the authenticity of the self. The primary thrust of this essay is to examine the success of the imagistmovement and the impersonaliztion of poetic expression. Toward this purpose,first of all, this essay deals with Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot; then, RobertLowell, who rebelled against the dominant poetics of the earlytwentieth-century, thus choosing to manifest himself in his poetry. The poetic experiments of T. S. Eliot and Pound were enormously dominantin the early twentieth century, breeding a number of followers andsympathizers; nevertheless, it also came to its own limitations in the long run;they failed not merely to minimize the self, but also to transform it into theirpoetic self, since we find so many traces of the self in their poetry. With the advent of existentialism in popularity among European philosophersright after World War II, I think, the self in human consciousness became ofhuge importance among the thinkers in other fields. Particularly, Americanpoets’ reaction to the dominant poetic experiment, “the Eliot government,” wasconspicuous; Robert Lowell’s Life Studies (1959) made a milestone prelude foran expression of self in poetry. With the self as the central focus of the poeticexpression, however, he was also in the wake of poetic expression of “theEliot government.” Poetry as literary work of art has to be defined in terms ofthe human condition, due to the absolute condition of its author’s limitations asa social being. It is indisputable that T. S. Eliot’s experiment and that ofRobert Lowell were remarkable poetic projects through which they attempted totransform their own individual experience (their first materials) into sharedexperience. But I believe that their failure to arrive at an artistic completionshould be found not only in human limitations but in the human condition as well.