임춘(林椿) 시에 나타난 허무의식과 비개미(悲慨美)

Abstract

There are poets who had a genius for writing a poem but deprived in every age throughout the history of literature. Im-chun, a representative poet of the 12C is such a case. He came from a respectable high-class family, but his family was ruined because of a military subject's rebellion. Im-chun had been in hiding ever since, and lived a tough life. First of all, he faced the financial difficulty because he was shorn of his own property by the government. The most excruciating pain of his life, however, is social deprivation and alienation. He continued to return to the political world, but failed each time. the civil service exam. To make matters worse, he failed the highest-level state examination to recruit ranking officials. At last he died wandering in despair and poverty. In this script, I examined Im-chun's some pieces of essays which describe his own tragic life and inquire into the sense of emptiness and aesthetic characteristics called 'Bigaemi(悲慨美)’. The best feature of Im-chun's poems is a way of expressing a sense of alienation and frustration. That is a kind of lunacy, which is called 'Bigaemi(悲慨美)’. His sense of 'Bigaemi(悲慨美)’ is sorrow and loneliness which he feels for his own helpless and shabby self in the gigantic world. This sorrow and loneliness turned into lunacy that are expressed in poems. Such process make Im-chun's life unhappy, but the history of sino-Korean poetry abundunt. Im-chun's poems were a cathartic experience to many readers. Im-chun is different from his contemporary poets such as Lee-kyubo and Lee-inlo. So he made Korean literary world rich and lead it to a higher level, which is the means for Im-chun to subsist in the history of sino-Korean poetry of the latter part of the Goryo Dynasty.