earticle

영어

In recent years, the extensive publication and study of Yeats's revisions has given us a figure of Yeats, who weighed carefully every word, every caesura, every syntactic form. Although examination of the revisions has prompted interesting speculations about the evolution of Yeats's poetic style in general, the sound features of the lyric poems remain largely unexplored. Though Yeats's own theory of poetic style is never systematic, his incidental comments make clear that he considers stylistic problems of the great importance. His care in selecting rhymes is revealed in many passing remarks about his poetry. These statements really show that Yeats's poetry depends more heavily than he himself realized upon the control of rhyme. The theory that rhyme is a device that unites similarity of sound with disparity of meaning has been largely ignored. In recent years, however, some literary theorists have argued that the crucial point in discussing rhyme and meaning is not whether the rhyme words are semantically divergent or congruent, but that they are, in either case, related. In the case of Yeats's poetry, there is a great divergence between the relative semantic weight of the early rhymes and those of Yeats's maturity. This thesis aims to describe the process of this stylistic evolution.