여로의 감각과 생활의 의미：김광균론

Abstract

This study illuminated the process of dynamic evolvement of Kim Kwang‐gyun’s poems from the 1930s to the liberation period under the light of organic association with the poet’s life, works, poetics, and essays. Kim Kwang‐gyun’s poems in the mid 1930s were in the process of transition from the classist tendency during his school days to pictorial modernism. This turning is related to his travel to Hamgyeong‐do in the middle of 1934 that he tried while having a social life in Gunsan. His poems of formative grammar, which were committed to description without exposing the speaker, reflect his experiences from the travel. From the travel experiences, he attained the sense of post‐reality, and the unfamiliar scenery of the northeastern region was settled in him as exotic visual images through A Memory of the Foreigners’ Village and The Composition of Afternoon, etc. Because it was a travel for getting away from the grief of the real life, however, the concreteness of life is removed from his formative images. In contrast, Kim Kwang‐gyun’s poems from 1938 begin to expose the speaker here and there and express his emotion toward the life in a big city. At first, it was an obscure emotion like “tears without reason” (Gaslight), but his aesthetic self‐consciousness is fully disclosed through the exploration of ‘form’ and ‘content’ in The Problems of Lyrics. On an Autumn day is a poem carrying the poet’s critical perception of the reality concerning modernity for augmenting contents “connected to the modern times by blood.” In this sense, his poems in the early 1940s describing his nostalgia for the hometown and death, which shows his returning to the past, may appear to be his poetic retrogression, but they are also considered the expression of the poet’s critical perception of urban life by revealing the speaker’s current situation missing the past. Kim Kwang‐gyun’s realistic attitude after the Liberation seems to be discontinuous and heterogeneous compared to the past, but it can be regarded as the continuity and extension of his perception of the reality formed since the late 1930s. The poet, who had been with leftist literary groups, showed a more opened view than that trapped in the death of his relatives before the Liberation by writing not only political occasional poems but also elegies for the death of others. After his conversion to centrism, he discovered the possibility of integration of the trend of the times (left) and individuality (right) in ‘daily life’ and wrote poems on the preciousness of daily life. By singing petit‐bourgeois’ “tiring life” and “the key of lost life,” his poems showed his own virtue awakening the readers to the value of livelihood, which had been neglected in the middle of ideological struggle between the left and the right.