This study investigates the poetic worlds of Park Jae-hong and Han Ha-un through a metapoetic framework, examining how physical pain and embodied memory are transformed into self-referential linguistic structures. Both poets share existential conditio...
This study investigates the poetic worlds of Park Jae-hong and Han Ha-un through a metapoetic framework, examining how physical pain and embodied memory are transformed into self-referential linguistic structures. Both poets share existential conditions shaped by disability and illness, and their works reveal a poetics in which “body memory” functions as the generative source of language.
By analyzing their poems across four conceptual axes—linguistic function, ontology, creative self-reflection, and reader-response—this study elucidates how metalinguistic utterances convert personal suffering into broader existential insight. Park’s poetry foregrounds fragmentation, silence, and recursive linguistic renewal, presenting creation as a cyclical process of dismantling and rebirth.
In contrast, Han’s poetry expands individual pain into collective memory, emphasizing consolation, transcendence, and communal longing. Despite these differences, both poets articulate a shared orientation toward transforming suffering into meaning. Ultimately, their works demonstrate a “unified structure of body memory and self-referentiality,” wherein language becomes a medium for existential healing and reconstruction. This study argues that their metapoetry constitutes an essential axis for understanding the linguistic and ontological shifts in modern Korean poetry