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에머슨과 프로스트 / 신비주의자와 시인
Articles in Korean : Emerson and Frost / The Mystic and the Poet
신재실(Jae Sil Shin)
현대영미시연구 4권 53-86(34pages)
UCI I410-ECN-0102-2009-840-004434306
* 발행 기관의 요청으로 이용이 불가한 자료입니다.

Harold Bloom says that "Frost`s religion, as a poet, was the American religion that Emerson founded," the credo of which is "Everything that can be broken should be broken." And Poirier tells us that "Frost was fond of saying...that Emerson was the great poet of rebellion." Both Frost and Emerson were the representative writers of the American spirit of rebellion. This paper is to compare Ralph Waldo Emerson and Robert Frost in terms of their definitions of poetry and the poet, their visions and consciousness of the world and common experiences, and their views of the poetic ways of expression. Emerson says in "The Poet" that poetry is "God`s wine," and that poets are "liberating gods". Emerson believes that "the Universe is the externisation of the soul", which is poetry itself, all written in the will of God, and that "The poet is the sayer, the namer," that is, the discoverer of the "God`s wine" and its distributor for the world to taste it and exhilarate themselves. But Frost says in "The Figure a Poem Makes" that a poem makes "the figure" that "begins in delight and ends in wisdom... a clarification of life-not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded, but in an momentary stay against confusion." Frost`s world is not like an Emersonian "round" circle, but like an oval which has two centers--Good and Evil, that is, the world of confusion. For Frost the poet is not the discoverer of God`s will in nature, but the maker of the poetic "figure", which can be "a momentary stay against confusion." For Emerson nature is fundamentally the words of God, who loves man, and the symbolic scene in which God`s design and intention can be ascertained. For Frost nature is valuable as the metaphoric particulars of the world in which good and evil are competing against each other. Emerson maintains to the last the tenet of his mystic idealism of the final unity of man and nature, but in his later essays, such as "Experience," "Fate", he shows his awareness of the harsh real world and emphasizes the power of human will of freedom, of human soul, and of human thinking which stand against the cruel fate. Frost shares, from first to last, the views and attitudes of later Emerson, praises the human beings` struggling soul against the "fate" of nature, and accepts the limitations of time, fate, death, and man`s limited power and frailty, without hating life. But there is a difference between the two writers in that Frost willingly expresses this awareness of the human limitations, while Emerson is not willing to. This difference is reflected in their views of poetic symbols or metaphors, to whose values as a necessary way of poetic expression both Emerson and Frost agree. Emerson, who is fundamentally a mystic, emphasizes the absoluteness of symbols. For Emerson, nature as the symbol of spirit preexists human time and experience, but whoever has the poetic talents can find the symbols of spiritual facts inherent in the natural facts, and express them in permanent language. On the other hand, Frost, who is a poet, emphasizes the temporariness of metaphors. Frost, who is basically a phenomenal realist, emphasizes the importance of analogy, as Emerson does, and defines poetry as "one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another". He does not insist, however, on the absoluteness of the metaphors, but warns against the danger of absolute metaphors. Metaphors, for Frost, exist as possibilities in nature, and they are abstracted experientially by those who have poetic talents. Emerson is a mystic who "nails a symbol to one sense," while Frost is a poet who "makes the same objects exponents of his new thought."

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