Park In-hwan, a poet, has been generally accepted as a modernist, dandy, sentimentalist and the like. His poems which were written over the period between the 1945 Liberation and the Korean War are based on his intense concerns about political issues ...
Park In-hwan, a poet, has been generally accepted as a modernist, dandy, sentimentalist and the like. His poems which were written over the period between the 1945 Liberation and the Korean War are based on his intense concerns about political issues and social realities. But his poems in the 1950s bears pessimistic and sentimental inclination. The existing Park In-hwan studies have explained that such a contrasting change were caused by the tragic experience of the war. However, in May, 1950, just before the Korean War, Park In-hwan published a poem, A Lament of 1950 in which he condoles his own self, putting his disillusionment and despair as dominant notes of the poem. So this study aims to suggest that his death-consciousness are more closely related to such factors as the National Security Law, Nation Guidance Federation, ideological conversion and mobilization rather than the Korean War, because the poem was published before the war. In this study, a close survey was made on Park`s literary activities during the period from his joining People`s Information Union until his conversion. This study did not put much emphasis on the thematic and aethethic analysis of Park`s poems. Rather, the study aims to explain his literary and political goals by introducing the microscopic approach to external factors like the bookstore <Librairie Mari>, the literary magazine <Sin Shi Ron>, his personal network, the characteritic and social environment of the media in which his poems appeared, the point of time when his poems were written and Kim Gyu-dong`s oral statements.