The following is the summary of the writer's comprehensive survey on Hwang Seok-U's poetical works and art.
1. The poet adheres to the technique of sensual description through this poetical works; he begins to make use of it from the period of Taeseo...
The following is the summary of the writer's comprehensive survey on Hwang Seok-U's poetical works and art.
1. The poet adheres to the technique of sensual description through this poetical works; he begins to make use of it from the period of Taeseomunvesinbo (News o Western Literature), and keeps to it to the periods of Pyeheo (The Ruins, the organic magazine of his poetry circle) and Jayunsong (Psalm of Nature, his anthology). Nevertheless he can hardly be said to be successful with it, because he gradually passes into common-sense-like, nursery-song-like recognition of it, and tends towards excessive use of simile.
2. His poetic tone is extremely temperate and ordered. This is because he is not so much a poet of emotion as a poet of technique. He is a rare poet in 1920's in that he, unlike many other poets, never fell in sentimental tone.
3. He was in advance of the contemporary poetry world of Korea in the theory of poetry. He was a kind of avant-grade who was western-oriented and future-orineted, as was revealed in his argument on Sinchyesi (new poetical style). Such terms as pictorial element, imagism, etc. used in his poetics are transformed into sensual descriptions in his poems. This poetic taste of his, however, was under the influence of western literary movement of imagist poetry via Japanese poetic circles at that time, therefore his background will be made clearer when further comparative study of Japanese and Korean literature is achieved. Sensualistic avant-grade as he is, sensual quality of his poems is partly indebted to the features of Korean language and tradition of Korean people.
4. He was the first poet in Korea who tried to write poems which least reflected the poet's real life. He never wrote poems which revealed his thought, activities, and misfortunes in real life. In this respect he is connected with those present-day poets who tend to write the same kind of poems.
5. He was ahead of Yukdang or Chunwon in the respects of poetics and attitude toward nature. This is not to say that he was the forerunner of the new poetry of 1920's. There was Kim Eok before him and Ju Yo-Hwan following him, but these two poets took their course to the folk song poets, while Whang remaining avant-garde who believed in western free verse. This is why there are those who are ready to regard him as one of the most important poets of 1920's.
6. He began to write poems in earnest just after the 1919 Independence Movement, and continued to write until late 1920's. He was one of those poets whose talent and importance in the history of poetry were underestimated because of their personality and private affairs.