소위 ‘전통 서정시’의 정체와 기반 양식

Abstract

Though once underrated as 'reminiscent habits shrinking into the past tradition, traditional Korean lyrical poems remain a unique and significant mode in the recent history of poetry. Against the movement inclined toward Western poetry, such as romantic or propaganda poems, Korean lyricism, formed until 1950s on the basis of traditional ballads and Sasul, aimed to recognize national identities and featured common daily language, simple forms, and passive or escapist awareness of realities. Their basic manners can be summed us as ballad tone, Sasul tone and landscape atmosphere of pure language. Those three manners have been established not only as the basic modes of the so-called ‘traditional lyrical poetry’ but, blended with free Western styles, as the central motives in recent Korean poetry as well. Initiated by Kim Eok in the 1920s and completed by Sowol as free verse patterns, ballad-tone manners were succeeded by such poets as Kim Dong Hwan and Kim Yeong Rang. Keeping away from ideological Chinese letters and foreign words, they expressed the emotions of the public in folk rhymes. While ballads consist of folk song styles with relatively simple words, Sasul has naturally developed into a modern style with its specialized lengthy lines since recent free and prose verse was introduced in Korea. First tried by a forerunner poet Choe Nam Seon, Sasul has been established as a free prose mode by Han Yong Un, whose feminine tone found audacious masculine voice in Yi Yuk Sa and transformed into the verse manners with folk landscapes by Baek Seok. Art-for-art-sake poetry in the 1930s took the most escapist stance toward realities. Jeong Ji Yong's landscape-mood lyrical poems related with Renaissance movement coped with Western Imagism by attaining a state of linguistic Oriental landscape with pure language which eliminated metaphorical meanings. This trend was respectively succeeded by the three poets of Cheong-Nok Group, and transformed into poems of agriculture by Shin Seok Jeong and Kim Sang Yong and into transcendental poetry seeking spiritual, everlasting existence by Seo Jeong Ju in the 1950s.