휘트먼에 있어서의 죽음 : 그의 대표작을 중심으로 = Death in Whitman's Poetry - Mainly on his representative poems -

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

While a number of authors and critics have seen in Whitman a poet of great genius, he is still regarded with reservation and suspicion in some circles. For example, the New Critics tend to find his poetry distressingly crude. The stereotyped view of Whitman as a poet of American democracy and optimism also contributes to the misleading Whitman legend which prevents us from seeing him as he actually is.
Now one of the sure ways of understanding a poet is to isolate his favorite motifs and to examine their significance. The theme of death recurs again and again in Whitman's poems. It is no coincidence that his representative works such as "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking", "Sleepers" and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed" deal, partly or entirely, with death. It can be safely assumed that Whitman was fascinated by death throughout his whole life and it exercised a curious attraction upon him.
His earlies poems, uncollected in Leaves of Grass, show that the poet glorifies the all-levelling death and finds comfort in it which makes all men equal. With the young poet death is both familiar and near, evoking no great fear or awe. Judging from his attitude toward it, his idea of death can be characterized as "tamed".
In "Out of the Cradle" which treats the old theme of "world harmony", the knowledge of death makes the speaker a poet and the world death is characterized as low and delicious. The poet eventually associates the voluptuousness of death with the deathlike quality of love. "Lilacs" is an elegy on the death of a national leader to whom the poet had a personal attachment. As with the traditional elegy, the poem begins with an expression of uncontrollable grief. The subject is, however, curiously distanced, and towards the end of the poem, the lines are permeated with the mood of reconciliation. It ends as a moving act of poetic reconciliation; a reconciliation not only to the death of a particular person, but a reconciliation to all death. In the course of passing from intense grief to a reconciliation of death and life, the poet gives us various conceptions of life and death. He conceives of death as painful for both the dead and those who remain (the " black murk that hides the star" is "harsh" to the star and "cruel" to himself); he considers death as restful (the coffin goes to "rest in the grave"). He also celebrates and glorifies death, calling it "strong deliverers". In both "Out of the Cradle" and "Lilacs" the poet makes an identification between the singing bird and himself in his character as poet. In both poems death is the source of the hope of transcendence as well as of sorrow. In both deaths is almost admirable in his beauty: complaisance toward the idea of death is remarkable. In this respect Whitmans attitude toward death is decisively romantic. In the final analysis Whitman as poet of death is not incompatible with Whitman as poet of democracy. Whitman was fascinated with death partly because he was deeply aware of "the equalitarian democracy of death".

목차 (Table of Contents)

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• 參考文獻
• Abstract