월콧의 풍자시학

Poetics of Derek Walcott’s Satire: Acceptance or Variation of the Augustan Age Satirists’ Tone, Style and Rhetoric

This study discusses Derek Walcott’s satiric poetics echoing from the critical voice on the Caribbean elites’ corruption, injustice, racism, separatism, oppression and failure. Walcott’s voice is different from that of an idealist whose genuine goal is to change society, eliminate vice, purge away corruption and establish the tyranny of virtue. It is also far away from that of a revolutionist who attempts to cut off the currency of established ideas and replace them with his own ideal notions. Instead, it has a remedial purpose, such as the exposure, censure and punishment of corruption, racism, separatism, and failure. Yet on closer investigation it doesn’t ask for change but for grumbling acquiescence. Walcott’s satiric imagery is direct. The poet doesn’t make relatively little use of irony and writes in a style closer to that of direct satire. Therefore, the poet’s raillery and rage may echo the low satire of Samuel Butler, one of John Dryden’s principal masters in the art of satire rather than the Horatian style of John Wilmot and Alexander Pope. But the poet’s direct imagery is far closer to Dryden’s Juvenalian one. The poet mingles irony with direct raillery as Dryden did in “MacFlecknoe”. And his mingling is more effective than pure irony. Yet the poet’s satirist is different from the Augustan satirists. The poet’s satirist seeks after justice, conscience, equality and unity as the Augustan satirists did. But the satirist is a humble, ugly, unfavorable and isolated artist while the Augustan satirists are highly intellectual, moral, philosophical guides or teachers. This imagery of the poet’s satirist reflects that of the artist who has been oppressed by the Western colonists, isolated by racism and religious prejudice.