Shin, HyunHo(Baekseok University) I The relationship between literature and the social environment is one of the writers matters of primary concerns, and summons up the writers emotion and imagination. The horrors of World War One (1914-19), with its accompanying atrocities and senselessness became the catalyst for the Modernist movement in literature and art. Modernist authors felt betrayed by the war, believing the institutions in which they were taught to believe had led the civilized world into a bloody conflict. Further, modern literature disillusioned with morals, religion and ethnicity attempted to portray mankind as it really was; questioning morals, ethics and the human soul. They no longer considered these institutions as reliable means to access the meaning of life, and therefore turned within themselves to discover the answers. After World War One many people found themselves unhappy, lonely, and depressed. With the groundbreaking influences of Karl Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche, many people began to question their own reality. What did it mean to exist? What
258 Shin, HyunHo was life, and what was death? The modernist authors reflected this change, and confronted these questions with enthusiasm. The Modernists present the various typical themes in their works, including: questions of the reality of experience itself; the search for a ground of meaning in a world without God; the critique of the traditional values of the culture; the loss of meaning and hope in the modern world and an exploration of how this loss may be faced. They were looking for a new vision and challenged the Modern Era. T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) and W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) were widely considered two of most powerful and effective Modernists. World War One, the colossal catastrophe which threatened to destroy the very foundations of modern civilization, fundamentally changed Europeans perspective on man. The war left people in a state of chaos and the world was coming into a state of uncertainty. It did far more damage to the hope of the future in people s minds. Before the war many still believed that man was innately good, after it people were disenchanted with this vision of man. The world had never seen such a horrible destruction as done during World War One, and most people were shocked at the extensive loss of human lives during the war. People went through the motions of life that there was a feeling just a mechanical existence. Many Modernist writers became the representative voice of the people. Both Eliot and Yeats as Modernists keenly felt this disenchantment, and evinced it in their poetry. Eliot and Yeats also saw the continuing turmoil in Europe, such as the Russian Revolution and the Irish Rebellions, as confirmation of their fear of man s nature and expanded their disillusionment in The Waste Land and The Second Coming. Eliot and Yeats shared a disbelief in the goodness of man s nature, they also both had religious experiences that colored their thoughts. Eliot was an atheist at the start of his life, and converted to Christianity, coming to believe in it with zeal. Eliot also toyed with Buddhism during one stage of his writing The Waste Land (Southam 132).
A Discourse on The Waste Land and The Second Coming from the Perspective 259 Yeats, on the other hand, grew up a practicing Christian and by the time he wrote The Second Coming was forming his own personal philosophy founded on an accumulation of everything he had read, thought, experienced, and written over many years, the result of the process whereby he had pieced his thoughts into philosophy (Harrison 1). His philosophy, therefore, included Christianity as a factor in his life, but not nearly as significant a factor as in Eliot s life. Born the son of a well known Irish painter with religious skeptic had many influences in his life. Eventually, he converted to Paganism from Christianity. Yeats was raised as a Christian and turned to pagan mysticism later in his life. Christianity is based on the salvation of a soul. A soul becomes healthy by its removal from the sin, which it inherits in the world. A healthy or virtuous soul is close to God by contact with the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit can be considered the spirit of God on earth. Jesus Christ is thought to be the embodiment of the Holy Spirit, therefore the embodiment of virtue. In contrast, Pagans worship the spirit of earth as a god, believing it to be the ultimate force, which is neither good nor evil. The religion states the more base human tendencies that Christians would call sinful would be glorified as the reflections of nature. Because of the importance of religion in both of their lives, Yeats and Eliot used many mythological and religious allusions in their poems. While both poets shared a disenchantment in the nature of man, their varying religions made them see different outcomes on mankind s horizon. Eliot saw the coming days as redeemable, while Yeats believed it could get more confused before the Second Coming. These divergent views are seen in their title choice, images, and allusions. The purpose of this paper is to survey the view of the coming days of those two poets, Yeats and Eliot, comparing The Second Coming and The Waste Land from their religious beliefs.
260 Shin, HyunHo II The Second Coming and The Waste Land differ from each other thematically on their views of the coming days. The Second Coming drawn from both Yeats s philosophical religious beliefs, and containing many mythological allusions depicts the approach of a new world order, tapping into the concept of the gyre. The gyre is one of Yeats s favorite motifs, the idea that history occurs in cycles, specifically cycles two thousand years in length. In this poem, Yeats predicts that the Christian era will soon give way apocalyptically to an era ruled by a godlike desert beast with the body of a lion and the head of a man. It means the age of Christ is over and a new, more horrible age is approaching. On the other hand, Eliot sees the future as redeemable in The Waste Land. He feels that life in the present is an emotional wasteland, that is empty and filled with automatons. To counteract the emptiness of life, Eliot sees hope for a fuller life by following examples of varied myths from the past and myths of present religions such as Christianity. The differing thrusts of the poems can be seen in the application of the titles. Yeats used strong literary and historic elements in literary form to evoke his symbolic message in The Second Coming. Through the use of his theme of the new Apocalypse, he imagined the world was coming into a state of uncertainty from the post-world War One Modernist experience. If he intends the title to mean the return of Christ, the Bible predicts many hardships before Jesus comes again. Yeats s personal mythology also holds that the coming days before new era or new cycle of history will be more disorderly than the present, because life will become a repetition of the distant past. Eliot, on the other hand, uses The Waste Land to reflect the emotional emptiness of humans in the present, and the individual titles, such as The Burial of the Dead and What the Thunder Said, to show a path that people must follow to remove themselves from this desolation. Yeats s choice of the title, The Second Coming, shows the double meaning of his philosophy, his blend of personal mythology and Christian beliefs. The Second
A Discourse on The Waste Land and The Second Coming from the Perspective 261 Coming refers to both his personal belief in the repetition of history, and his Christian belief in the return of Christ. To Yeats, World War One was the first sign of Christ s return as referred to in Matthew 24. In his nontraditional beliefs, Yeats believed that history would repeat itself, that the end of the Christian era was upon man, and that the future would revert to one of the early, darker stages before Christ. Yeats uses the poem to express his personal belief that the future of man will be a reversion to man s darker past. Like Yeats, Eliot carefully chose the title, The Waste Land, for its symbolic meaning. The Waste Land implies fruitlessness and emptiness, accurately describing the way Eliot perceived humankind s psyche after the devastation of World War One. Eliot believes that people who lack emotions are neither living nor dead and thus have emptiness where a spirit once inhabited (Leavis 101). Each section of The Waste Land also has its own title with its own meanings. Section one, The Burial of The Dead is taken from The Book of Common Prayer, the common title of a number of prayer books of the Church of England and used throughout the Anglican Communion. Eliot s choice of the title is appropriate because the living people in this section are flat people, emotionally dead and thus deserving to be buried. Section two, A Game of Chess takes its title from a play by Middleton. Chess was seen as a metaphor for human life, and if played with actual people would be a very violent game, where the most powerful player, the queen can be taken by force. This section has many references to rape and the emptiness of human life, almost as if people were players on a chessboard being pushed this way and that by unseen forces. Section three takes its title directly from Buddha. The Fire Sermon was given by Buddha being against the fires of lust, anger, envy and other passions that consume men, reflecting the evil emotions that men are engulfed in when they have emotions at all (Southam 165). The title of section four, Death By Water, brings to mind the ancient fertility rituals in which men would be drowned only to be reborn later (Vickery 264). When the poem reaches this section, the narrator wants to escape the empty, evilness of life
262 Shin, HyunHo and be reborn into a full life. The final section, What the Thunder Said has a clear meaning. It is taken from the Upanishads and the thunder is the voice of God who utters Da three times. The Da is taken to mean Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata or in English, to give alms, have control, and have compassion. Eliot tells humans how to live in order to come out of The Waste Land (Southam 192). Thus each individual section becomes a step in the journey that man must take to remove himself from the empty waste he is living in. Section one of The Waste Land introduces characters and the basic pattern of rebirth from sterility; and section two and three develop the theme of modern sterility through concrete examples which expose the corrupted state of the modern world. After the death scene of section four, which makes a turning point for the thematic development, the persona undertakes a painful journey through the wasteland. Finally he is given three moral advices of the Thunder as the means of coping with the situation. Eliot says When I wrote a poem called The Waste Land some of the more approving critics said that I had expressed the disillusionment of a generation, which is nonsense. I may have expressed for them their own illusion of being disillusioned, but that did not form part of my intention. (Selected Essays 368). As Eliot expresses, The Waste Land has three important themes, not just the single theme of sterility (Rees 31). A. Sterility ( dead land, disintegrating city, death in life ) B. Sexual Love ( lust, impotence, indifference ) C. Rebirth ( fertility gods, grail quest, religious voices ). And each of the poem s five sections is dominated by one of these themes. Following this analysis, the first section The Burial of the Dead, is regarded as the theme of sterility. The poem s second section A Game of a Chess, and the third section The Fire Sermon have to do with the theme of sexual love. And the fourth section Death by Water, and the fifth section What the Thunder Said of the poem must be depicted the rebirth theme. Therefore, we have to recognize the Eliot s method of developing his themes. The sexual love and
A Discourse on The Waste Land and The Second Coming from the Perspective 263 rebirth themes often serve as variants on the sterility theme. Importance is a form of sterility, while fertility symbols (under the rebirth theme) act against those of sterility (Rees 168). Like Yeats and Eliot did with the titles, their images reflect their different focuses and thoughts on the coming days in The Second Coming and The Waste Land. Both poets use dark images that reflect their disillusionment with the idea of modern man as being innately good. Yet they differ from each other in using their imagery when dealing with the future. Yeats uses circles and images, such as the sphinx, that invoke fear to prove his point that the future will be a reversion to the dark past before Christ. There is no hope for the future in The Second Coming, in contrast, Eliot sees the coming days as more hopeful, that can be better than the past or present. This desirable future can be achieved only if many people follow the narrator on his journey out of the wasteland making the desert wasteland a hospitable forest in which a full life can flourish. Meanwhile, Yeats creates pictures in The Second Coming that show both the modern horrors and the shadow of affliction on the horizon. His separation of the falcon and the falconer who are so close that neither are able to provide for himself without the other exemplifies the confusion in the modern world. The unnamed sphinx awakens and slowly crawls in the desert, foreshadowing terrors yet to come. By describing the rough beast as a shape with lion body and the head of man, that brings darkness as it moves, Yeats predicts that the coming days can only be more turbulent than the present. The falcon plays an important role in its relations to the sphinx. Having studied mythology, Yeats knew that the sphinx was a representation of the Egyptian god, Horus, who was reborn each day as the rising sun. For Yeats, the sphinx was an appropriate symbol because of his vision of history as cyclical. Horus was also seen as a falcon ; Yeats thus links the current era to his cyclical vision of time (Harrison 5). Yeats s statement That twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by rocking a cradle proves his idea that the time of Christ is almost
264 Shin, HyunHo over, and humans will return to domination by pre-christian ideals and darkness. The murkiness that embodies the sphinx and these ancient ideals slept peacefully for two thousand years, a significant time in that it is close to the perceived dawn of the Christian era. It is also important because of his own personal belief that the cycles of history reverse themselves about every two thousand years. The phrase rocking a cradle, symbolizes World War One and the death of thousands and the loss of innocence, thereby signifying the end of an era. An image that Yeats s employs throughout The Second Coming is that of circles. Circles, with no end and no beginning, are the symbol of perpetual repetition. Yeats uses a gyre to show both confusion and repetition. The gyre is one of Yeats favorite motifs, the idea that history occurs in cycles, specifically cycles twenty centuries in length. Gyre in the first line symbolizes history, or the life cycles of men. As a gyre turns bigger and bigger while keeping its original shape, which is round, it means that even though everything, like technology keeps on improving, human nature and the lives that we live never do. History keeps on repeating itself, and human never learn from their mistakes. In a spiral man cannot tell which way is up and which is down, but travel still goes in the round, repetitive path of a circle, reflecting Yeats s vision of the modern period. The rough beast; its hour come round implies that time has come full circle back to the darker time before Christ. Yeats s uses dark, quick images to convey his theme, while Eliot uses physical setting and photographic descriptions to convey his theme in The Waste Land. The physical setting varies from the London business sector to a typist s apartment, from a bar to a luxurious room; yet, all of the scenes are soulless. The Thames, which was the common way in and out of London for centuries, is empty; The nymphs are departed. Empty to Eliot means emotionally dead, making London, the cultural mecca of England, a wasteland. The city of London is crowded, but its people are like those who in life knew neither good nor evil (Southam 151). London becomes an Unreal City. This city is an intense but, meaningless horror exemplifying that
A Discourse on The Waste Land and The Second Coming from the Perspective 265 the city s people are so emotionally dead as to be meaningless, thus making the city terrifying (Leavis 104). Another setting Eliot uses is that of a room. Luxurious as the room may be, its occupants are gone, leaving only the memories and beauty behind. Typical of all of Eliot s scenes in the poem, these three settings depict everyday places lacking all soul because the people who populate them are empty spiritually and emotionally. Eliot s dark and somber images reflect the people who use them. The rock exists with no water, a brown fog covers London, and the bar is dimly lit at night. Many images of destruction such as the broken tent and the dead tree add to the feeling of desolation. The people are unemotional, they do not smile or cry; they just are. Bones and corpses and rats abound, which brings to mind death and fear and blackness. All of these dark images go toward the emptiness that Eliot sees around him after World War One. Even when the speaker realizes the solution, he is found in an arid region, one that lacks water that is necessary to life just as the wasteland lacks emotion also necessary for life. The fact that the speaker realizes the solution in an environment where life cannot exist reveals the fact that the wasteland is so deep that even if the solution is known, no one can reverse the emptiness. The differences in theme are most notably reflected in the poets varying allusions of The Waste Land and The Second Coming. Yeats uses the falcon and the sphinx to interconnect the past and the future, invoking his idea of the repetition of history. His sphinx also represents the horrific past, which will quickly become humanity s future. He also uses the falcon to show the confusion and disorder that are in the world today. On the other hand, Eliot uses religion and ancient myths to show that the past can instruct us on a way to escape the waste land. Eliot gives humans hope for the future by giving them myths that have life after death, characters that have escaped the emptiness before, and the teachings of modern religions to give us a path to follow.
266 Shin, HyunHo III Yeats takes into speculation that the coming days will certainly bring further darkness than is already present in the current world. He employs various symbols and allusions to assert his claims of the world s ultimate demise. The purpose of these symbols and allusions make it possible to fully understand Yeats s point of view of the fall of our present civilization and the rise of a new civilization with a gloomy future. The Second Coming uses Christian imagery regarding the Apocalypse and second coming as allegory to describe the atmosphere in post-war Europe (Albright 35). The Second Coming of Christ referred to Revelation in the Bible is here described as an approaching dark force with a ghastly and dangerous purpose. Though Yeats s description has nothing in common with the typically envisioned Christian concept of the Second Coming of Christ, as his description of the figure in the poem is nothing at all like the image of Christ, it fits with his view that something strange and heretofore unthinkable would come to succeed Christianity, just as Christ transformed the world upon his appearance. One of Yeats s major symbols, the widening gyre, is used systematically to show the destruction of the current civilization and the emergence of a new one. The continuing turning and turning of the gyre illustrates the last breath of a period of history and its plunge into a new repressive world. And the falcon, a bird of nobility, brings many images to mind. The noble falcon represents the order Yeats saw in the world in the Middle Ages (Harrison. 4). From the Middle Ages, Yeats jumps to the modern period, reminding people of the Russian Revolution and other recent bloody events, such as the Irish Rebellions. The Second Coming, foretells how the Second Coming brings horror and repression to the world. In the last two lines of the first stanza of the poem we see that the logical order of things is reversed; the best lack all conviction while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity. (CP 210) Everything is turned in an opposite direction since a new order of things is introduced. In Yeats s mind, many
A Discourse on The Waste Land and The Second Coming from the Perspective 267 of the recent uprisings are attacks on the nobility. According to some interpretations the best referred to the traditional ruling classes of Europe who were unable to protect the traditional culture of Europe from materialistic mass movements. When he separates the bird and its keeper, Yeats reveals their disruption of the order and cohesion, that he believes exemplifies the modern world (Harrison 4). The Second Coming is viewed as a prophetic poem that envisions the close of the Christian epoch and the violent birth of a new age. The poem s title makes reference to the Biblical reappearance of Christ, prophesied in Revelation of the Bible, which according to Christianity, will accompany the Apocalypse and divine Last Judgment. Other symbols in the poem are drawn from mythology, the occult, and Yeats s view of history as defined in his cryptic prose volume A Vision. According to the cosmological scheme of A Vision, the sweep of history can be represented by two intersecting cones, or gyres, each of which possesses one of two opposing tinctures, primary and antithetical, that define the dominant modes of civilization. Yeats associated the primary or solar tincture with democracy, truth, abstraction, goodness, egalitarianism, scientific rationalism, and peace. The contrasting antithetical or lunar tincture he related to aristocracy, hierarchy, art, fiction, evil, particularity, and war. According to Yeats s view, as one gyre widens over a period of two thousand years the other narrows, producing a gradual change in the age. The process then reverses after another twenty centuries have passed, and so on, producing a cyclic pattern throughout time. The two forces, the objective age that departs and the subjective age that has not yet been established, have not yet reached a point of equilibrium. Yeats s belief that historical cycles perish in social and political upheaval and are followed by their cultural opposites is related to his belief that larger cycles perish in general geological upheaval, caused either by fire or water (Seiden 28). In the early twentieth-century Yeats envisioned the primary gyre, the age of Christianity, to be at its fullest expansion and approaching a turning point when the primary would begin to contract and the antithetical enlarge.
268 Shin, HyunHo The principal figure of the poem is a sphinx-like creature, a rough beast awakened in the desert that makes its way to Christ s birthplace, Bethlehem. The concluding lines of the poem, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,/ Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? (CP 211) refer to Yeats s belief that history was cyclic, and that his age represented the end of the cycle that began with the rise of Christianity. The Second Coming is a powerful brief against punditry. In the post-christian era of which Yeats was writing there was no Bible to map out what the next coming would be. The world would have to look toward Bethlehem to see what rough beast arrived. Eliot develops his theme by allusions to religion and mythology. In The Waste Land Eliot alludes to the Bible and to Eastern Religions. For example, he employs Sanskrit which is the language of the Hindu religion, to give the answer to escaping the wasteland : Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata (Southam 192). Eliot explicitly offers the solution in What the Thunder Said. Eliot weaves in a Hindu story in which gods, devils, and humans each ask their common father, Prajapati, for advice. Prajapati replies to each with the single syllable da, which is interpreted as Datta, Dayadhvam, and Damyata Hindu words meaning to give alms, to sympathize with others, and to practice self-control. Eliot suggests these three practices as cures for the ills plaguing the wasteland. Also references to the Bible, such as God having Moses bring water from a rock, the effects of the death of Christ, and many direct quotes like Son of Man. suggest the resurrection and rebirth. Eliot s references to religious imagery give a sense of truth to his claim of there being a chance of a better future. Eliot uses ancient mythology, particularly the fertility myths, to further prove that humans can emerge form the wasteland. The opening sentences of the poem, the readings of the Tarot cards, and the fourth section all show fertility myths. Opening with April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain. Eliot starts the
A Discourse on The Waste Land and The Second Coming from the Perspective 269 poem off with the theme of life emerging from death. Each winter, the land appears dead and the people long for April to bring life again. Yet once April comes, the plants seem to take forever to reappear and fill the land with life again, making April a type of waste land. The idea of April as a wasteland relates to ancient myths when in Ancient Egypt, man had to wait for a new Nile which he waited for under a seal of profound dejection. April also was a time when ancient people designed a number of ceremonies to protect people from the evil and destruction in the world (Vickery 247-8). Eliot places the concept of life after death in the forefront of people s minds from the start of the poem, causing them to think of hope for getting out of the emptiness. The Tarot cards and the fourth section represent the fertility myths in similar ways. The drowned Phoenician Sailor appears in both. The sailor was a fertility god who was thrown into the sea each year to symbolize the death of summer (Southam 149). Each part includes a wheel which represents the circular motion of time, and thus the resurrection of the dead. Eliot s Hanged man is also a fertility god, according to Eliot himself (Southam 151). Simply put, the Tarot cards, and part four, Death by Water, keep the seed of hope for getting out of the wasteland alive. The mythological reference that Eliot considers most important is that of Tiresias. Tiresias is a character who, in Greek mythology, spent time as a man and as a woman. He was blinded for spite and had the gift of prophecy. By using Tiresias, Eliot makes all the sexes one. Tiresias unites all the people in the poem into one person. Each individual person in the poem represents a type of human, and by uniting the characters Eliot makes the wasteland a universal human condition. Tiresias understands the wasteland, and because of his having prior experience with desolation in Thebes, he also offers hope for improvement to all. The Waste Land and The Second Coming see the present in the same light but the future differently. Both poets see the same terrible present because they experienced a similar disenchantment with man s innate goodness after World War
270 Shin, HyunHo One. Their visions of the coming days differ because of the way that their religious beliefs have developed. Eliot, as a Christian, believes that there is a chance of escaping desolation, while Yeats, incorporating Christianity with his own personal mythology, believes that the future will be a return to the horrors of the ancient past. Although the poets see the present similarly, their religious differences cause them to view the future differently, consequently Eliot s The Waste Land has a much more hopeful theme than Yeats s The Second Coming. IV Yeats was an accomplished Irish poet and was known for the socio-religious ideas he emphasized in his poetry. Yeats specialized in the early modernists style of literature. Modernistic writers felt that traditional teachings left something to be desired, and that it was time for change. There was a huge upheaval in religious beliefs and current religious convictions were being challenged with new scientific knowledge. The Modernistic period was also a time when questions were asked about the old, established, and customary beliefs. Writers attempted to challenge people to think about archaic ways of conduct, and to check the motivations behind their beliefs. Although formally different from Modernists, Yeats shares authoritarian hostility to modern society: aristocratic ideals, classical heroism, outright contempt for mass society and etc. From 1916 at the latest Yeats was increasingly concerned with the decline of the West. Yeats foresees spiritual changes in the words, Surely some revelation is at hand;/surely the Second Coming is at hand. (CP 211). The time in the modernist era was reflected in the chaotic, and choppy word structure in Yeats poem, The Second Coming. In this poem, Yeats predicts that the Christian era will soon give way apocalyptically to an era ruled by a godlike desert beast with the body of a lion and the head of a man. Critics have argued about the exact
A Discourse on The Waste Land and The Second Coming from the Perspective 271 meaning of this image, but a close reading of the poem, combined with some simple genetic work, shows that Yeats saw the new order as a reign of terror haunted by war. From the title of The Second Coming, one might expect to read about the glorious return of Christ to save his followers. However, Yeats portrays a dismal world where anarchy reigns over the innocence of man. Yeats s perspective on the world s troubles was not what many people who quote him today might suspect. For one thing, he was not a Christian. He dabbled in theosophy and the occult, and considered Christianity an idea whose time had passed. The Second Coming is not, as its title and the Bethlehem reference might suggest, an account of the return of the Messiah. What is being born is nothing resembling Christ. Therefore, the passage, the Second Coming is at hand, portrays a dark and foreboding atmosphere that serves as a warning to what may lie ahead for humankind if we continue on our current path. The Second Coming, in its entirety, is an astounding encapsulation of Yeats s idea of the gyre and his fears about the future of mankind; it is expertly woven with threads of prophetic literary reference and impressive poetic techniques. As a modernist poet, Eliot struggled to remove the voice of the author from his work but the work is still a reflection of the author s interpretation. He paints the picture as he sees it for the readers to view and interpret from their own perspective. The Waste Land could be viewed as a chronicle Eliot s difficult and not quite successful journey to confront his own unconscious or spiritual reality. In his poem The Waste Land, Eliot employs a water motif, which represents both death and rebirth. This ties in with the religious motif, as well as the individual themes of the sections and the theme of the poem as a whole, that modern man is in a wasteland, and must be reborn. The poem, however, does not answer its own question, maybe because the presence of water would make things right. Still, the end of The Waste Land seems to hold some comfort, some hope that the wrongness in the world need not be perpetuated. Eliot s theme is the rehabilitation of a system of beliefs, known but now
272 Shin, HyunHo discredited. The Christian material is at the center, but Eliot never deals with it directly. The theme of resurrection is made on the surface in terms of the fertility rites; the words which the thunder speaks are Sanscrit words. He is so much a man of his own age that he can indicate his attitude toward the Christian tradition without falsity only in terms of the difficulties of a rehabilitation; and he is so much a poet and so little a propagandist that he can be sincere only as he presents his theme concretely and dramatically. Both Yeats s Second Coming and Eliot s The Waste Land present a renewal process, but each one focuses on different goals and subjects. Eliot on a particular person s transformation, whereas Yeats predicts a turn of the entire world as a result of an escalation of chaos. And while Yeats attempts to present a definite picture of what he believes will happen at the time of this renovation, as a human being, lack of foresight leaves him to conclude with nothing more than an unanswerable question. Eliot, on the other hand, uses ambiguity to support and develop his theme: death is the way to rebirth. In contrast, Yeats maintains a pessimistic tone created by his futility on the bleak situation. Works Cited Albright, Daniel. Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and the Science of Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Eliot, T. S. The Complete Poems and Plays: 1909-1950. New York: Hartcourt, Brace, & World, Inc., 1962.. Selected Essays. London; Faber and Faber, 1951. Harrison, John R. What rough beast? Yeats, Nietzsche and historical rhetoric in The Second Coming, Papers on Language and Literature, Fall 1995.
A Discourse on The Waste Land and The Second Coming from the Perspective 273 Leavis, F. R. The Waste Land. T. S. Eliot: a Collection of Critical Essays. ed. Hugh Kenner. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1962. Rees, Thomas R. The Technique of T. S. Eliot, The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1974. Southam, B.C. A Guide to the Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1994. Seiden, Morton. William Butler Yeats: The Poet as Mythmaker. New York: Cooper Square Publishers, Inc., 1975. Vickery, John B. The Literary Impact of The Golden Bough. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973. Yeats, W. B. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. New York: Macmillan, 1956.
274 Shin, HyunHo Abstract Shin, HyunHo The purpose of this paper is to survey the perspective of the coming days of those two poets, Yeats and Eliot, comparing The Second Coming and The Waste Land. Both Yeats s Second Coming and Eliot s The Waste Land present a renewal process, but each one focuses on different goals and subjects; Eliot on a particular person s transformation, whereas Yeats predicts a switch of the entire world as a result of an escalation of chaos. And while Yeats attempts to present a definite picture of what he believes will happen at the time of this renovation, as a human being, lack of foresight leaves him to conclude with nothing more than an unanswerable question. Eliot, on the other hand, uses ambiguity to support and develop his theme: death is the way to rebirth. But for Eliot this rebirth, which must be necessarily obscure and extremely perplexing to the newly-born. In contrast, Yeats maintains a pessimistic tone created by his futility on the bleak situation. Though the two poets see the present similarly, their religious differences cause them to view the future differently, consequently Eliot s The Waste Land has a much more hopeful theme than Yeats s The Second Coming. 주제어 (Key Words) (The Waste Land), ( The Second Coming ), (chaos), (switch), (rebirth), (religious differences).