워즈워스 시의 역사적 상상력 —「허물어진 농가」와 기타 시를 중심으로

Abstract

This study is an attempt to investigate the radical political ramifications of Wordsworth's early poetry, with a special reference to “The Ruined Cottage,” “Goody Blake and Harry Gill,” “The Last of the Flock,” and “Michael: A Pastoral Poem.” Some of the so-called ‘historicist' critics of Wordsworth argued that his early poetry tends to reveal the symptoms of his later political conservatism, while other more genuinely ‘historial' critics emphasize the ancient local communitarianism tenaciously held on in his poetry. Sympathetic to the latter's position, this paper closely analyzes Wordsworth's four poems to recuperate the authentic historical meaning in his poetry. Overall, Wordsworth's poems discussed here deal with the historical problem in the transitional period of the Industrial Revolution and the Agricultural Revolution in the late 18th century Britain, through a personal account of the tragic suffering of an individual or a family, often an artisan and/or a small farmer whose traditional mode of production was destined to decline with the rise of the industrialized England. It is my premise that Wordsworth in these poems does not look back to or idealize the medieval socio-economic system which was dominated by the landed aristocracy but rather implies a utopian image of the traditional local communitarianism which goes back to the ancient times of Anglo-Saxon England, as an alternative to the dehumanizing forces of modern Industrialism. Wordsworth's sympathetic account of the honest, once-happy and hardworking rustic people in the throe of historical change, provides a radical critique of the ideologies of laisez-faire political economy and the controversial New Poor Law, because of the critical distance which the residual mode of production takes from the dominant one. The ramifications of Wordsworth's radical critique of the contemporary British society might be discussed in the further studies of Wordsworth.