• (The)Study of the Eastern Classic
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• no.50
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• pp.55-88
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• 2013

Gwonwu Hong Chan-yu is one of the modern and contemporary Korean scholars of Sino-Korean literature and one of the literati of his era, so is respected as a guiding light by academic descendants. Gwonwu was a teacher of his era, who experienced all the turbulence of Korean society, such as the Japanese occupation by force, the Korean War, the military dictatorship, and the struggle for democracy, and who educated and led young scholars of his time. However, academia has not payed attention to his life and achievements since his death. This paper is to examine the poetry of Gwonwu Hong Chan-yu, one of the representative modern and contemporary scholar of Sini-Korean literature, which has not yet been discussed by academia. The minimal meaning of this paper is that it is a first work based on his anthology, which has not been discussed by academia, and a first full-scale study on Gwonwu Hongchan-yu. For the reason, this paper aims at the detailed inspection of his poetic pieces recorded in his anthology. Nonetheless, despite such intentions, some limits cannot be avoided here and there in this paper for the insufficient knowledge and academic capability of this paper's writer and for the lack of academic sources. Gwonwu's poetry examined through his anthology shows the characteristic which is that his poems focus on exposing his own internal emotions. Such a characteristic says that his idea of poetic literature payed attention more to individuality, that is exposition of private emotions, than to social utility of poems. Gwonwu's such an idea of poetic literature can be generally affirmed throughout his poetry. Accordingly, Gwonwu preferred classical Chinese poems to archaistic poems, and single poems to serial poems; and avoided writing poems within social relations such as farewell-poems, bestowal-poems, and mourning-poems. When the characteristics of Gwonwu's poetic literature get summarized as such, however, some questions remain. The preferential question is whether the poems in his anthology are the whole poetry of him. Although Gwonwu's poetic pieces that the writer of this paper have checked out till now are all in his anthology, it is very much questionable whether Gwonwu's poetry can be summed up only with these poems. The next question is what is the writing method for taking joy(spice), sentiment, and full-heart into his poems if Gwonwu's poems focus on exposing his internal emotions, and if poems exposing joy and poems exposing sentiment and full-heart appear coherently in various different spaces and circumstances of writing. The final question is what are the meanings of Gwonwu's poems if his poetry checked out through his anthology directly shows either the reality carried in his poems or the reality of a time in his life. The questions listed above are thought to be resolved by the synchronizing process of stereoscopic searches both for Gwonwu as an individual and for the era of his life. Especially, spurring deeper researches toward a new direction regarding Gwonwu's poetry has an important meaning for construction of a complete modern and contemporary history of Sino-Korean literature and for procurement of continuous research on Sino-Korean literature and its history. For the reason, it is thought that more efforts of researchers are required.