Kim Kwang-gyun was the poet who expressed the poetic formativeness distinctly among the 1930's Modernists. But he has been estimated negatively because of passive emotion toward reality, image which was little more than rhetorical method, and sentimen...
Kim Kwang-gyun was the poet who expressed the poetic formativeness distinctly among the 1930's Modernists. But he has been estimated negatively because of passive emotion toward reality, image which was little more than rhetorical method, and sentimentality which stood for pictures. The purpose of this study is to review these evaluations and to explore the formativeness and modernity of Kim Kwanggyun's poetry.
First, the relationship between lyrics and the visual arts is examined. Kim Kwang-gyun was influenced by pictures through the friendship with other artists and the western picture book, and it was applied to pictorial composition in order to catch and structure the images.
Next, the organic relationship between form and content, and between the thought and the form are examined, centering around 'the thought of form', that is, the key words of Kim Kwang-gyun' poetics. This concept shows that his pictorial isn't nothing but a technique of imagism, but also shows that it is a means of a formativeness which can express modern reality in a new method.
Finally, modern characteristics which were expressed in Kim Kwang-gyun's poetry are discussed. For him, emotion is the substitution or modified product of idea, and it is mainly related to the frustration toward reality and modernity. The grief and gloom shown in his poems can be said to be not only the product which was caused by the experience of city life, but also the modern emotion which is differentiated from the recitation of Romanticism.
These modern characteristics are not limited to the nature of emotion, but they are shown in the methods of expressing the emotion. The point of Modernity shown in Kim Kwang-gyun' poetry is that sentimentality was constructed formatively and it also secured the appreciation of the beautiful. Thus, the formativeness of Kim Kwang-gyun's poetry should be understood, beyond the narrow category of pictorial methods, in terms of modern aesthetics of Modernism poetry in the 1930's.