1930년대 중･후반 김광균 시의 낭만과 모던

Abstract

In the history of poetry, works of Kim Gwang-gyun from the mid－ to the late－1930s have been a topic of discussion and assessments for its descriptiveness and formativeness centered on imagism. Subjective sentimentality of the poems is characterized by its closeness to romanticism, and they were often considered to be mere partial adaptation to English－American imagism. Rather than paying attention to the relationship with English imagism, therefore, it is crucial to shed light on both the atmosphere of the contemporary poetry world as well as the features of poems themselves in the reevaluation of Kim Gwang-gyun’s poems, which points to the issues of romanticism and romance as well as the sense of descriptiveness and melancholy. The descriptiveness of Kim Gwang-gyun’s poems lacks the embodiment of imagery which would endow the disconnection from the world of English－American imagism, exclusion of meanings, and elimination of subjectivity. The consciousness of the poet that induces pictorial reconstruction is linked to romanticism. Kim Gwang-gyun depicts the scene from his own perspective, and, at the same time, adopts impressionistic replicative methods that imprint his own emotion to the scenery. On the other hand, such melancholy founded upon grief, loneliness, and misery is Kim Gwang-gyun’s modern sensibility that echoes through modern city life under the colonial rule. These features lay underneath modern sensibility which, as Kim Girim once said, brought tears to the readers, who were not as much touched by the poems written by Park Yong-cheol or Kim So-weol. Differing from social modernity fronted by Imperial Japan, within this melancholy it is possible to find spiritual paradox of modern colonial Joseon that were bleak, dreary, and yet profound. It is the melancholy in the name of modernity. Such proposition challenged the central ideology of the contemporary society, such as progress, empire, Japan, and civilization. By looking at what lies underneath such melancholy, can one find the possibility of criticizing and overthrowing misdirected understanding of colonial modernity. This is one of the legacies of Kim Gwang-gyun’s poetry and Modernism in the mid－to the late 1930s.