근대시사에 있어서의 시조부흥운동의 성격에 관한 연구

Abstract

In the history of world literature, a free-verse movement started from the battle with the antecedent cultural custom, the fixed form of verse, handed down from ancient times in certain cultures. The various grounds supporting this hypothesis can be found in the European countries that guided the modern times and our neighbors, like Japan and China. The problem is Korea. The orthodoxy till now is that early poets, including Ju Yo-han, Kim Eok, and Hwang Seok-woo led the free-verse movement, following the movement for destroying the tradition in French symbolical poetry. However, if someone asks us, “What is the traditional form of verse our modern literary movement destroyed?”, we do not have an answer. It is easy to answer Sijo or Gasa as an example, but strictly speaking, both were styles that had not reached a fixed form of verse. Sijo had a critical limitation that it is not a subject of literary reading but lyrics of a song, while Gasa was very likely to reach a fixed rhythm in that it is a genre read aloud, but it died out, not being able to become a fixed form of verse as it moved on the road of lengthening like Travel Gasa or Exile Gasa. At the early stage of the history of our modern poetry, since there is no model of poetry to fight and overcome, there was an extreme pattern, such as being bound by the rate of the number of letters like 4-4 or 7-5 or clinging to prose poetry. The modernization of poetry did not progress through the stages from the fixed form of verse through free verse to prose poetry as often said. The free verses we see today were born through the process of ambiguous and tough seeking between ‘making a fixed form of verse’ based on the rate of the number of letters and ‘writing prose poetry.’ “The Revival Movement of Sijo” in the mid-1920s can be said to be a literary movement born in the process in which our early literary people who had been swayed between ‘making a fixed form of verse’ and ‘writing prose poetry’ doubted if Sijo would be the traditional fixed form of verse they should fight against. The discussion about Sijo, which began like this was concluded by Garam Lee Byong-gi in the 1930s, but that was not at a satisfactory level. What leaves something to be desired the most is that the method for reading Sijo was not developed and popularized formally, for it means that the golden opportunity was lost to completed a fixed form of verse in our own spoken and written language. Therefore, in the future, school education should put an end to the exploration of literary history in 100 years of modern times by paying attention to the job of developing a model of reading Sijo.