서정주의 시세계2―떠돌이의의미망혹은정신기제

Abstract

It is said that the basic spirit of Suh, Jungju's poetry represented constantly from his first collection Flower Snake (1941) to his last one 80 Aged Young Wanderer's Poems (1997) is vagabondism or Bohemianism. This paper analyses above all Suh, Jungju's famous collection Winter Sky (1966) in order to identify the vagabondism which means irresponsible and outsider-like attitude for the contemporary age. Here the poet's vagabondism is similar to the attitude of intellectuals not critical but adaptable to the situation ruled by military political leaders. This adaptable attitude, which is distorted as the life-wisdom of life of the hard times in his seventh collection A Wanderer's Poems, is embodied in the image of 'orchid' The image of orchid fundamentally means the wisdom of men who have lived servile for a long time. As poems such as 'lucky maid' or 'Song' show, the poet emphasizes that adaptable attitude symbolized as orchid would be necessary to every man's life. He does not, of course, emphasize only the wisdom of adaptable life in this collection. Sometimes he bitterly resents the ruling class of the despotic age in 1970s. For all that, I can not regard his rage as a perspective of the future based upon rational and systematic outlook on the world. It would be true that his fatalistic and narrative outlook on the world represents some dualistic attitudes to the reality of the present society. It can be ascertained in the fact that he above all wandered between the people symbolized as 'sea' or 'thing-daddy' and the Yushin despotism also imagined as 'Brutely Courageous General' or the 'Devil'. It is no exaggeration to say that this dualistic attitude reflects his pro-military life and poems since Gwangju Democratic Movement in 1980.