최승자 시 연구 - 시의식의 표현 양상을 중심으로

Abstract

Choi Seung-Ja started her literary career through writing ‘Love of this time’ and four other poems in quarterly publication magazine ‘literature and intelligence’ in 1979. She has been considered a poet who opened a new prospect in the field of poetic expression by making a new attempt through abandoning the existing female poets’ traditional lyric expression and suggesting a new viewpoint on facing the facts. The purpose of this study is to help understand Choi Seung-Ja’s poems through studying death and alienation expressed in her poems. Her representative writing methods are as follows. First, she uses the image of death to depict love. She makes use of the detailed death image to bring the memory of already-gone painful love to the present. She also calls attention to the meaning of love which is painful but still ongoing by regenerating the present aspects of love as factual and detailed image. Second, she incarnates the consciousness of poems by the image of body. One of the remarkable features which appear in Choi’s poems is to express her vision of poems through physical thought and image about bodies. As for a poet, a body is not outward appearance of the mind, but concrete reality on which life is based. We cannot communicate with the outer world without through bodies. Choi regards a body as truth which cannot be erased and the only way to meet the world. A poet deepens the reality of truth which he or she desires by the use of body image. Third, she deepens themes using the negative speech. In many cases, poets describe ironically the tragic awareness of the present situation and existence, which is a way of exaggerating the poetic meaning effectively by opposite expressions of what they really want to say. Choi not only accepts this ironical expression as an antinomic statement but also reflects her attitude toward life in which she wants to get over such a confusing situation. I hope this study of Choi Seung-Ja’s methods of expressing the consciousness of poems will help understand poets’ mind.