• International Journal of Advanced Culture Technology
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.181-187
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• 2021

According to Joseph Campbell, there is always a similar pattern in the hero myth, which is called hero's journey. The legends about Cuchulain, the great Irish warrior, also follow this pattern. W. B. Yeats adapts the legends into his plays with Cuchulain as the protagonist. This paper discusses the protagonist's heroic journey in the five Cuchulain plays written by Yeats. In the five plays, Cuchulain grows, matures, weakens, dies, and resurrects, completing and meanwhile sublimating his heroic journey. In At the Hawk's Well, Cuchulain shows potential qualities of a hero. The Green Helmet displays his self-growth through the depiction of his heroic merits which make him a true hero. In On Baile's Strand, the hero suffers from the major frustrations and tribulations in his heroic journey and is stricken down consequently. The Only Jealousy of Emer reflects the hero's inner struggle and vulnerability. The last play, The Death of Cuchulainn, marks the end and reincarnation of the hero's life. Through the depiction of Cuchulain's heroic journey in the five plays, his heroic qualities are well demonstrated. Meanwhile, Yeats's views of heroism can be found as well.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.2
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• pp.315-335
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• 2009

Controversies over W. H. Auden's "political" poetry remind us of an old but perhaps never easily resolved problem about the relationship between poetry (literature) and politics. Auden has arguably been referred to as a "leftist" or "Marxist" because of his political viewpoint registered in "Spain" or "September 1, 1939," which embodies his contemporaries' loss and fear, brought by the socio-political turmoil, economic depression, and moral conflicts of the 1930s. Interestingly, however, Auden is known to have an ambivalent position toward the political reality. He once disavowed the above "political" poems as "dishonest" in the preface of the 1966 edition of Collected Poems and declared, "poetry makes nothing happen" in "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," which seemingly acknowledges the political incapacity of poetry. Auden's position and poetry should be understood as the result of complicated interactions between his perspectives on society, human beings, and poetics. Auden definitely believed in the role of poetry in such a politically demanding time, yet was not concerned with the anticipation of certain immediate changes effected by poetry in real situations. Instead, he sought the intellectual and moral effects that poetry could give his readers to help them survive the dismal circumstances of the 1930s. This is what distinguished Auden's poetry from political propaganda. In doing so, Auden's poetry captures the zeitgeist of his generation and has privileged him as the leading voice of his time, but it has also encouraged the following generations to confront different socio-political difficulties. This is something poetry can make happen politically, and the survival of Auden's "memorable speech" proves the legitimacy of his frequently misunderstood poetics.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.60 no.2
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• pp.315-338
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• 2014

In The Great Hunger (1942) Patrick Kavanagh opens an Irish postnationalist discourse. Taking advantage of historical revisionism and postcolonialism, he not only demystifies a romantic nationalist ideology rooted in rural Ireland but also searches for an autonomous literary tradition free of the Irish Literary Revival, supposedly an outcome of a colonial influence. As a farmer-poet, Kavanagh deconstructs in two ways myths of rural areas, to which the Revivalists aspire. Contrary to Revivalism, he reveals that rural Ireland is not an idealized place where national identity arises and individual spirits are restored. It is instead a cruel place where farmer Maguire, deprived of health, wealth, and love, is tortured by hard labor in the field, moral regulations imposed by the Church, and his mother's domestic authority, all of which leave him unmarried until age sixty-five. Kavanagh also challenges the Revivalist tradition, led by W. B. Yeats commonly referred to as the poet of the nation, by indicting its reliance on former colonial authority and its lack of a sense of communal autonomy, both of which are diagnosed as "provincialism" by Kavanagh. Given that modern Irish literature has been strongly colored as nationalistic during the course of anticolonial resistance, Kavanagh's critique of the Revival in The Great Hunger, whose proponents blindly beautify the lives of farmers, runs directly against the grain of the founding ideology of the Irish nation-state. His voice, like that of a whistle-blower, disclosing the harsh realities of rural Ireland, ushers in a "post"-nationalist perspective on nation and national myths in Irish poetics.