박인환 시에서의 우울과 시간의식

Abstract

The overflowing emotions of melancholy and sorrow in Park, In-hwan's poems has been interpreted as his consciousness of the death; his keen attention toward the reality seems to have been transformed into pessimistic attitude, which turned him to the interior after he experienced the Korean war. However, in the sense that those emotions of melancholy and sorrow are in close connection with the poet's unique concept of time, we have to understand those as something with its own historicity. Park construes historical time through the moments and achieve the positive attitudes through his poetic method of recollection. He makes the past present through the recollection; what is not existent any more is associated with the present through this poetic imagination, and this allows humans to be saved from the momentary despair. The positive exposure of the melancholic emotion in his poems does not mean that he indulged himself with pessimism; it means that he took the different position toward the war from others. In his poems, time is always the time of the positive present and this unique conception allows him to break away from the general concept of the linear flow of time. Park tries to construct and reevaluate what he experienced at the war while positioning himself at the positive moments with escaping from the conceptual framework of the progressiveness of time. The melancholy is accompanied with Park's struggle to understand the historical tragedy of the war and to discover the human values at its site. Though Park's untimely death prevented him to take this poetic achievement to another level, his poetics allows us to comprehend the issue of overflowing emotions in the post-war Korean poetry from a new angle.