워즈워스의 「피터 벨」에 나타난 독자의 역할과 해석의 문제

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초록

This essay attempts to explore the ways in which Wordsworth integrates his audiences in his 1819 poem, “Peter Bell: A Tale,” as part of innovating and expanding his relationship with readers. In the 1800 “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth defined the poet as “a man speaking to men”; hence, his poetry presupposes the constructive relationship between poet and reader from composition through reception. Initially, he planned to publish the poem in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1798 as a counterpart to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere.” In this regard, this essay claims that “Peter Bell” is the continuation of Wordsworth’s early poetics for the following two reasons: first, readers are constitutive of the poem as the immediate auditors; second, supernatural poetry is replaced by natural and everyday poetry.
“Peter Bell: A Tale” showcases the double role of audience as both interpreter and constituent of the poem. To be precise, the poem embraces a framed narrative, through which occurs the sharing of stories as a vehicle for the speaker's and his neighbors' contributing to the production and interpretation of poetry. Moreover, the current context of the tale apparently promises the repetition of a similar occasion in which the story is told and heard in a different time and space. Therefore, the relationship between the speaker and his audiences within the text extends to that of the poet and his readers mediated by the print culture. “Peter Bell” foregrounds the multiple layered structures of interpretative voices: first, Robert Southey as a reader of the prologue before publication; second, the speaker's neighbors as immediate auditors; and finally, the readers whose voices are not heard and yet implied inevitably from the moment of inception. Consequently, the text of “Peter Bell” is produced only insofar as his direct and indirect audiences co-exist. First, in his dedication to Southey, Wordsworth responds to the poet laureate's negative review of the prologue, advocating his own poetics of everyday as opposed to Southey's predilection for the supernatural and epic. Wordsworth’s critique of the supernatural entails the transformation of both the speaker and Peter Bell from supernatural to natural, callous to sympathetic hearts. Their change proves partly nature’s correction and partly their voluntary decision to stay close to the humans in their vicinity; but it is far from mystical. Second, challenged by his neighbors and yet engaging them in the narrative, the speaker bears witness to a hermeneutic community represented in the text as well as the readers outside the text. Furthermore, the speaker’s neighbors help him employ the “real language of men,” thus affirming Wordsworth’s poetics to replace a hackneyed poetic diction with the experimental poetry inspired by ordinary rustics as in Lyrical Ballads. Finally, the first-hand audiences' intervention in and redirection of the speaker's narrative is contingent upon the poet's demand for his readers' active participation in the interpretative community via the print culture. In the middle of hostile reviews, mocking satires and parodies, in particular, Francis Jeffrey’s The Edinburgh Review and Leigh Hunt’s The Examiner, Wordsworth's poem marked record-sale, thus inducing more aggressive responses from such younger poets as John Hamilton Reynolds and Percy Bysshe Shelley, who wrote Peter Bell: A Lyrical Ballad and “Peter Bell the Third” respectively. These works attest not only to the younger poets' attack upon the old poet's affinity with conservative politics but also to their own involvement in the signification of “Peter Bell” as readers.

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