This study originates from a perspective aimed at interpreting the religiousness manifested in the poetry of Park Seowon. Specifically, it aims to examine the aspects of pluralistic religious imagination, the transformation of the sacred, and the disc...
This study originates from a perspective aimed at interpreting the religiousness manifested in the poetry of Park Seowon. Specifically, it aims to examine the aspects of pluralistic religious imagination, the transformation of the sacred, and the discursive utterances of the poetic subject, focusing primarily on poetic diction and motifs. Hitherto, research on Park Seowon’s poetry has predominantly emphasized aspects such as feminine poetry, confessional poetry, and pathology. However, limiting the methodology for deciphering Park Seowon’s pathos-driven and abstruse poetic utterances to a few restricted themes poses definite constraints. Grounded in this critical awareness, this study proposes the religious diction and motifs that repeatedly surface throughout Park Seowon’s oeuvre as a novel horizon for interpreting Park Seowon’s poetry. As a preliminary step, this study quantitatively examines the deployment of religious diction in Park's three early poetry collections, predicated on the concepts of "the sacred" and "the profane" from the perspective of Mircea Eliade’s phenomenology of religion. Out of a total of 158 poems, 80 poems were identified(with a margin of error of ±5 poems); the resulting figure of 50.6% serves as empirical evidence demonstrating that religiousness constitutes a crucial analytical component in the discourse of Park Seowon’s poetry. Furthermore, during Park Seowon’s lifetime, the poet frequently addressed the anxieties of the poet's literary life in tandem with the poet's religious identity as a Catholic believer through various interviews and publications. Consequently, religion must be regarded as an un-marginalizable domain that cannot be overlooked in the scholarship on Park Seowon’s work. Amidst the physical and psychological torment and social disasters depicted in Park Seowon’s poetry, the utterances of the poetic subject intertwine with religiousness—ceaselessly constructing and collapsing meaning, thereby generating the différance postulated by Jacques Derrida. The multilayered religious symbols emerging from Christianity, Buddhism, shamanism, primitive religions, and mythology—transcending East and West, past and present—do not consolidate into a religious semantic network within a single doctrinal system. Instead, they operate as a medium that exposes the subject’s pluralistic desire for salvation, seeking escape from a state of suffering akin to the "hell" of reality. Concurrently, the signifier "heaven" is employed as a metaphysical locus: a heaven oriented toward awaiting a salvation that has "not yet arrived" within a horizon of diverse possibilities capable of transcending reality. However, within Park's poetic space, "messianic time" remains absent. As Walter Benjamin noted, the intervention of the Messiah—which exerts divine violence by interrupting the framework of continuous and homogeneous historical time, thereby bringing about "salvation"—is presented merely as an indefinite possibility. Accordingly, for Park's poetic subject, the universe of totality, the cosmos, functions as a longing for paradise, an eternal nostalgia. The subject thus gropes for a new possibility of salvation. "Exstasis"—a state of standing outside (ex) this world (stasis), namely "ecstasy"—is understood within Georges Bataille’s aesthetics of eroticism as a quintessential transcendence involving the union of Thanatos and Eros. This trajectory of confronting the fundamental human inquiry of "life and death" ultimately converges toward religiousness and is reduced to the order of the sacred. Through interviews, the poet explicitly stated that the poet recognized Park Seowon’s own poetry as a genre of religious poetry, a testament to the religious sublimation of literature. Within a state of perpetual sliding, the subject positions the sacred and the self identically, thereby achieving a mystical union with the divine. Instead of the plurality of gods across diverse religiosities—including Christianity, Buddhism, and shamanism—who were invoked but remained unresponsive, Park Seowon’s poetry transitions toward a direction where the subject achieves the subject's own salvation, ultimately advancing into a religious dimension of messianism without messianism.