휘트먼과 스티븐스의 명상시 —영시 읽기의 동양적 접근

초록

Of many American poets, Whitman and Stevens can be called Oriental idea based poets, of which Korean scholars have written articles until these days. Whitman is a meditative poet who devoted himself in the transcendental idea and we can find a kind of Hindu meditator in his poem, Song of Myself. He was much different from other English poets, Tennyson or Wordsworth who lived in the same period and were also meditative. They attached to the traditional Western idea, while Whitman was free from that. Wallace Stevens was also unique on this point of view. His poems are very difficult to understand at first, because they are full of paradoxical ideas. They are too ambiguous to be comprehended with our common mind. But we can find they are similar to the Zen poetry of Buddhist monks, which is written in the state of sudden enlightenment. We can understand his poems from the view of Zen which sees the world as only an appearance. As a result we can realize the oriental idea in American literature and their Transcendentalism is very similar to it.

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