earticle

영어

The position of W. B. Yeats as a poet in the twentieth century English literature is firm. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923 and has been universally regarded one of the greatest poets in the last century. Throughout his lifetime, he wrote a considerable amount of plays, novels, and prose besides the poems. Among them, he had a great interest in drama throughout his life and wrote plays until just before his death. Not only did Yeats write a lot of plays, he also founded a theater (The Abbey Theatre) and had done many innovative experiments there. But Yeats’s reputation as a playwright or dramatist is not so high. One of the reasons for his low reputation as playwright is the negative estimation of influential critics. The purpose of this paper is to defend Yeats as a playwright. To do so, this paper seeks to find causes that Yeats’s theatrical endeavors have not been recognized so far and tries to refute the critics’ negative arguments. To explain the nature and characteristics of Yeats’s plays which are very different from the realistic ones, At the Hawk’s Well, one of his dance plays, is examined as an example. And then tries to examine what Yeats wanted to accomplish through drama and his contribution to the European drama.