낭만적 엘레지와 애도의 정치학: 셸리의『애도네이즈』읽기 (Romantic Elegy and the Politics of Lamentation : A Reading of Shelley's Adonais)

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 19세기영어권문학회
· 수록지 정보 : 19세기 영어권 문학 / 18권 / 1호 / 31 ~ 63페이지
· 저자명 : 박찬길

초록

Adonais is an elegy written as a response to Tory critics' onslaught on Keats. Shelley wanted to take revenge on Tory critics not in the political arena of verbal joust but in the higher ground of literary tradition. He chose to compose an elegy to commemorate Keats. He had two objectives in his composition: one was to defend Keats and himself from the calumny of Tory critics' in the contemporary literary society, and the other was to fight Wordsworth who was Shelley's own mentor of poetry in his early years but became now the most dominant poet of the Tory camp. Wordsworth was the major enemy to fight in Shelley's mind because he still remained “the most natural and tender of lyric poet” even after his political apostasy. He had to win Wordsworth in his private war of poetry not only to revenge Keats but also to bring justice to the Hunt group in the history of English poetry.
Shelley's Adonais is a subversion of Wordsworth's elegy in its logic of lamentation. The mourner's grief, for example, was discretely contained in Wordsworth's elegy, whereas it is offered in Adonais as the only way of going beyond human mortality. The consolation based on the idea of the mourner's reunion with the mourned in the afterlife proves impossible from the beginning of Adonais because the division of life and death is inexorable and irreversible. Shelley's nature, unlike Wordsworth's, does not respond to human passions at all, leaving no room for sympathetic communication between them. The mourning process in Adonais is now taken over by Shelley himself who, unlike other mourners, willingly and completely identify himself with the mourned. This self-apotheosis appears to be a “metaphysical suicide” to some scholars, but to me only a rhetorical device required by the elegy's logic. Shelley's literary “martyrdom” at the concluding stanza should be understood as his efforts to convince readers of Keats' (and his own) apotheosis without compromising his atheist conviction. Adonais is a peculiar poem indeed as an elegy with a skeptic view of life, its lack of consolation, and the mourner's complete identification with the mourned, which, however, makes it the finest example of the elegy produced in the romantic period.

영어초록

Adonais is an elegy written as a response to Tory critics' onslaught on Keats. Shelley wanted to take revenge on Tory critics not in the political arena of verbal joust but in the higher ground of literary tradition. He chose to compose an elegy to commemorate Keats. He had two objectives in his composition: one was to defend Keats and himself from the calumny of Tory critics' in the contemporary literary society, and the other was to fight Wordsworth who was Shelley's own mentor of poetry in his early years but became now the most dominant poet of the Tory camp. Wordsworth was the major enemy to fight in Shelley's mind because he still remained “the most natural and tender of lyric poet” even after his political apostasy. He had to win Wordsworth in his private war of poetry not only to revenge Keats but also to bring justice to the Hunt group in the history of English poetry.
Shelley's Adonais is a subversion of Wordsworth's elegy in its logic of lamentation. The mourner's grief, for example, was discretely contained in Wordsworth's elegy, whereas it is offered in Adonais as the only way of going beyond human mortality. The consolation based on the idea of the mourner's reunion with the mourned in the afterlife proves impossible from the beginning of Adonais because the division of life and death is inexorable and irreversible. Shelley's nature, unlike Wordsworth's, does not respond to human passions at all, leaving no room for sympathetic communication between them. The mourning process in Adonais is now taken over by Shelley himself who, unlike other mourners, willingly and completely identify himself with the mourned. This self-apotheosis appears to be a “metaphysical suicide” to some scholars, but to me only a rhetorical device required by the elegy's logic. Shelley's literary “martyrdom” at the concluding stanza should be understood as his efforts to convince readers of Keats' (and his own) apotheosis without compromising his atheist conviction. Adonais is a peculiar poem indeed as an elegy with a skeptic view of life, its lack of consolation, and the mourner's complete identification with the mourned, which, however, makes it the finest example of the elegy produced in the romantic period.

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