김현승 시의 종교적 상상력

Abstract

Kim, Hyun-seung is both a poet and Christian. His poems throughout the entire period of his life show the religious imagination, and have particularly so many allusive expressions to biblical passages. In addition, the transcendental imagination can be found in the religious imagination. This paper would classify the aspects of the religious imagination in his poems into the allusive imagination and transcendental imagination. Allusion as a deformation of symbol is one of metaphors that punctuates writer’s intention directly or indirectly by quoting wellknown sentences, phrases, or names of persons. Sources of allusion become the subjects or themes of modern poetry, and the formal structures of works, and then have been stimulating an imagination of modern poets. The available sources of allusion have many facets over the East and West. Biblical allusions in Kim, Hyun-seung’s poems, which is based on the religious imagination, make certain figurative contexts by overlapping new meanings. His allusion as a sort of being juxtaposed combination─‘clothes of shyness’, ‘poverty’, ‘tears’, for example, would help to expand or elevate the subject by arranging itself in a harmonious relationship or conversely in a relationship of conflict for content. The concept of transcendence generally refers to the point beyond a certain area or critical situation. In other words, it means that human beings always being exist in here now naturally free oneself from here now. Also, it is to exist outside of the world of perception and experience in a dimension of consciousness. The key point of transcendence is to go forward an ultimate world through the transition of existence. In his poems, the space of transcendental imagination to the celestial is an area in ‘sky’, ‘clouds’, etc, and the space of ground is a boundary between the celestial and underground, such as ‘horizon’, ‘cliffs’, ‘branches of trees’, etc, and then the underground is the space in a tomb or cave. Consequently he is a poet who pursue the eternity through transcendental imagination which could cross different spaces, that is, sky and earth, this world and the other world.