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

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.56 no.2
• /
• pp.219-236
• /
• 2010

As a poet, a reviewer of books, and an editor of a major literary journal, Marianne Moore participated in aesthetic revolution which invented the American poetry of the twentieth century. Of all the modernists, she was one of the few truly technical originals, and became an endearing mascot of poetry. Innately attentive to detail, Moore wrote a myriad of poems about animal and plant subjects, and set out to develope and secure her own particular paradigm for modernist poetic and the poetry of objective and scientific description. Foregrounding a mind scientifically trained, Moore used her verse to demonstrate a means by which to see the reality beyond the obvious. Ironically enough, however, a central difficulty with understanding Moore's poetry lies with her concern for such scientific or surface description and precision. In order to understand Moore's poetry fully, it is of special necessity to appreciate relativity among the seemingly disparate entities such as science and literature, as Moore herself did. This paper explores the way in which the poetic techniques of Moore substantiate her sense of morality that underlies the creation of her poetry. Rather than merely addressing her artistic genius or craftsmanship as a modernist poet, Moore's methods engage the power of imagination, magic, lifting the human spirit and eschewing anthropocentric perspectives. For Moore, the poet's magic comes by diligence. In so doing, as I would argue here, Moore draws on the nature of language, especially what Bakhtin insisted with his notions of polyphony and carnival. By introducing openness to various perspectives and meanings in her verse, Moore succeeds in maintaining her own sense of creativity while continuing to acknowledge morality. In a similar skein, her use of active verbs in animal poems and the kaleidoscopic descriptions demonstrate how Moore accommodates imagination and reality, and form and content.

• Journal of Ginseng Culture
• /
• v.4
• /
• pp.13-37
• /
• 2022

Even before recorded history, the Korean people took ginseng. Later, poetry passed down from China developed into a literary style in which intellectuals from the Silla, Goryeo, and Joseon Dynasties expressed their thoughts concisely. The aim of this paper is to find Korean poems related to ginseng and to look for their semantic network. To this end, "Korea Classical DB ", produced by the Institute for the Translation of Korean Classics, was searched to find ginseng poems. As the result of a search in November 2021, two poems from the Three Kingdoms Period, two poems from the Goryeo Dynasty, and 23 poems from the Joseon Dynasty were searched. An examination of these poems found that the first ginseng poem was "Goryeoinsamchan," which was sung by people in Goguryeo around the 6th century. Ginseng poetry during the Goryeo Dynasty is represented by Anchuk's poem. Anchuk sang about the harmful effects of ginseng tributes from a realistic point of view. Ginseng poetry in the Joseon Dynasty is represented by Seo Geo-jeong in the early period and Jeong Yakyong in the late period. Seo Geo-jeong's ginseng poem is a romantic poem that praises the mysterious pharmacological effects of ginseng. A poem called "Ginseng" by Yongjae Seonghyeon is also a romantic poem that praises the mysterious medicinal benefits of ginseng. As a scholar of Realist Confucianism, Dasan Jeong Yak-yong wrote very practical ginseng poems. Dasan left five ginseng poems, the largest number written by one poet. Dasan tried ginseng farming himself and emerged from the experience as a poet. The story of the failure and success of his ginseng farming was described in his poems. At that time, ginseng farming was widespread throughout the country due to the depletion of natural ginseng and the development of ginseng farming techniques after the reign of King Jeongjo. Since the early 19th century, ginseng farming had been prevalent on a large scale in the Gaeseong region, and small-scale farming had also been carried out in other regions. What is unusual is Kim Jin-soo's poem. At that time, in Tong Ren Tang, Beijing (the capital of the Qing Dynasty), ginseng from Joseon sold well under the "Songak Sansam" brand. Kim Jin-Soo wrote about this brand of ginseng in his poem. In 1900, Maecheon Hwanghyeon also created a ginseng poem, written in Chinese characters. Thus, the semantic network of Korean ginseng poems is identified as follows: 1) Ginseng poetry in the spirit of the people - Emerging gentry in the Goryeo Dynasty (Anchuk). 2) Romantic ginseng poetry - Government School in the early Joseon Dynasty (Seo Geo-jeong, Seonghyeon, etc.). 3) Practical ginseng poetry - Realist School in the late Joseon Dynasty (Jeong Yak-yong, Kim Jin-soo, Hwang Hyun, etc.). This semantic network was extracted while examining the development of Korean ginseng poems.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.55 no.2
• /
• pp.315-335
• /
• 2009

Controversies over W. H. Auden's "political" poetry remind us of an old but perhaps never easily resolved problem about the relationship between poetry (literature) and politics. Auden has arguably been referred to as a "leftist" or "Marxist" because of his political viewpoint registered in "Spain" or "September 1, 1939," which embodies his contemporaries' loss and fear, brought by the socio-political turmoil, economic depression, and moral conflicts of the 1930s. Interestingly, however, Auden is known to have an ambivalent position toward the political reality. He once disavowed the above "political" poems as "dishonest" in the preface of the 1966 edition of Collected Poems and declared, "poetry makes nothing happen" in "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," which seemingly acknowledges the political incapacity of poetry. Auden's position and poetry should be understood as the result of complicated interactions between his perspectives on society, human beings, and poetics. Auden definitely believed in the role of poetry in such a politically demanding time, yet was not concerned with the anticipation of certain immediate changes effected by poetry in real situations. Instead, he sought the intellectual and moral effects that poetry could give his readers to help them survive the dismal circumstances of the 1930s. This is what distinguished Auden's poetry from political propaganda. In doing so, Auden's poetry captures the zeitgeist of his generation and has privileged him as the leading voice of his time, but it has also encouraged the following generations to confront different socio-political difficulties. This is something poetry can make happen politically, and the survival of Auden's "memorable speech" proves the legitimacy of his frequently misunderstood poetics.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.57 no.2
• /
• pp.191-215
• /
• 2011

This paper aims at investigating Dorothy Wordsworth's later conversation poetry, which has not been the focus of critical discussions on her literary works. While many critics have been emphasizing Dorothy Wordsworth's journals and the tendency of self-effacement in her prose, this paper argues that her later poetry often reveals acute self-consciousness about the circumstances that condition this self-annihilation and searches for a creative way to endorse her own identity. In "Lines Intended for My Niece's Album," she expresses anxiety and uncertainty about the inclusion of her poetic piece in Dora Wordsworth's album, which contains poems by prominent male writers of the contemporary period. "Irregular Verses" presents Dorothy Wordsworth's self-conscious narrative of her girlhood and shows how her own ambition to become a "Poet" has been stifled by external circumstances, including the ideology that instills the idea of proper womanhood into aspiring girls. While these poems examine contemporary gender discourse and the frustrated poethood resulting from it, other poems activate conversations with William Wordsworth's poems and thereby provide a revisionary re-writing of her brother's texts. For example, in "Lines Addressed to Joanna H." Dorothy Wordsworth becomes "a woman addressed who herself addresses others." Her scrupulous approach to her own addressee refuses to subordinate the other to the self's will, and through this revision of "Tintern Abbey," Dorothy Wordsworth vicariously liberates her own self confined in her brother's poems. "Thoughts on My Sick-Bed," which echoes "Tintern Abbey" through borrowed phrases and direct address to William Wordsworth, foregrounds her own poetic identity in the form of the first-person pronoun "I." Dorothy Wordsworth's continual illness during this period of her life paradoxically allows her the time for personal reflection formerly denied to her in her busy life constantly occupied by physical and spiritual labor for others. Instead of earning satisfaction from the subsumption of her creative energy under William Wordsworth's poetical endeavor, Dorothy Wordsworth finally starts to affirm her own poetic identity that can properly express her inner vision and artistic talent. Although this final affirmation remains largely incomplete due to her later mental collapse bordering on madness, it powerfully conveys the hidden literary aspiration of the formerly frustrated female poet.

• English & American cultural studies
• /
• v.18 no.2
• /
• pp.79-104
• /
• 2018

Chung Ji Yong is a well-known poet in the Japanese Occupation Period firstly as a lyrical and traditional poet as a member of the literary journal Simunhak(Poetry Literature) along with Park Yong Chul and Kim Young Rang and later as a prominent modernist poet in the late years of the Period. He is always highly estimated as a poet of pictorial images and lyricism, but his ardor for translations, especially Walt Whitman has been neglected so far. Before him, Ju Yohan, Yi Kwang Soo, Yi Un Sang, Kim Hyung Won and many other poets and critics had been interested in Whitman's democratic ideas and his poems. Chung Ji Young also translated Whitman's three poems in the hard days of 1930s. After the Imperial Japan surrendered to the Allied forces on 15 August 1945, ending 35 years of Japanese occupation, Korea was under the American forces and Russian troops. In this critical days of Korean's debating only one korea or separated Koreas, strangely enough, Chung ji Yong fully immersed in translating Whitman's poems only for four years as an English literature professor just before being abducted by North Korean Army, while almost discarding his own poetic ability and sense of duty as a leading poet in the literary circle with only just a few exceptions. Why did Chung Ji Yong focused on the translation of Whitman's poems in this important period as a poet and intellectual in the newly independent country? He may want to warn people too much ideological conflicts or at least express his frustration through translating Whitman's poems. Until now, academic endeavors on Chung Ji Yong's poems and life are focused on his lyrical and modernistic works of the Japanese Occupation Period and naturally little interested in the days of Independence period and his true motivations on translating Whitman's poems. As a proposal, this short article can be a minor trigger for the sincere efforts of Chung Ji Yong's last days.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.64 no.3
• /
• pp.307-327
• /
• 2018

In light of Korean inclusion of its diaspora as part of the nation, a "creolized" approach that brings together constructions of the bad subject of Asian American studies with conceptions of the Korean minjung grounds an analysis of two poets as they might be considered from a bi-national, Korean and U.S. American, perspective. The poets Ed Bok Lee and Jason Koo show different ways of being the bad subject. Lee is clearly a bad American subject, resisting American white racial hegemony, and his poetry often addresses a kind of American minjung multiculturalism, as is shown in poems from his first two books Real Karaoke People and Whorled. He challenges some aspects of contemporary Korea, and might be a kind of Korean bad subject in those challenges. Koo, on the other hand, resists the call to bad subjectivity, so that his poetry may not fit the preferred paradigm of Asian American studies, as he recognizes. As he resists that paradigm, he also gives little attention to his Korean heritage, so his not-bad American subjectivity becomes bad Korea subjectivity. He recovers some measure of badness in the final poem of Man on Extremely Small Island when he connects briefly to his Korean heritage and his Asian American present. The creolized juxtaposition of the bad subject with the minjung suggests the use of these poems in considering both American and Korean society.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.56 no.1
• /
• pp.25-45
• /
• 2010

While environmental ethics, a relatively new field of philosophy, has gained its practical power in the contemporary world, the ethics of ecological poetry has not been studied well and the relationship between poetry and ethics has also been troubled for a long time. How can it be probed, interrogated, and constructed in ecological criticism? Attempting to steer some critical focus to the topic of ethics and poetic language, this essay is to elucidate these questions within the ecological traits of Mary Oliver's poems. In the process of revisiting Oliver's poems, this essay tries to rescue the poet Oliver, one of the most gifted poets in contemporary American poetic landscape, but a long-neglected one, and questions of ethics which have been evaded for a long time in ecological criticism. Oliver's ecological imagination at once invites readers to become other in the outer world in a most spontaneous way and re-questions the fundamental distance between the self and the other in the process of becoming other. Challenging the humanistic view of nature, she opens the various layers of becoming other: from the possible state of perfect merging to the sad recognition of the impossibility of merging, from the happy moment of rebirth beyond death, to the conflicting moment of being-together. In the different cycles and levels of becoming other, Oliver's poetry completes the poetics of relation in the components of 'self-in-relation.' In those different layers of relations, the ethics of ecological poetry is newly explored rather than residing in the safe net of goodness or sympathy between the self and the other, or the stark division between the two. Oliver's witty, sensitive, sometimes sad eyes toward others, therefore, entice readers to move from the established view of nature to the extraordinary moment of encountering it, thus accomplishing the ethics of beings, not just of ecological poetry.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
• /
• no.4
• /
• pp.229-247
• /
• 1998

Keats is a poet who was in pursuit of 'the beautiful'. He tried to show various structures in his poetry to search for 'eternal pleasure'. These are explained in terms of 'metamorphosis', 'travel structure' and 'metamorphosis patterns', but put together, these can be expressed as simple terms of a dramatic structure. Especially We can assume this dramatic structure is the key to access his poetry on the basis of the fact that Keats always admired the world of drama and respected Shakespeare most. We can see Keats' dramatic structure in his poetry Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn. To Autumn and so on, and in these three poems, he was very successful in achieving unique poetic expression by inducing tension structure' through the dramatic structure of Introduction - development - crisis - climax - ending. In conclusion, his poetry achieved success in that he made clear his central theme, the pursuit of a beautiful and happy life through the application of a dramatic structure.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
• /
• v.16 no.3
• /
• pp.253-268
• /
• 2010

Robert Lowell is one of the major poets in the modern American poetic world. His major work, Life Studies, is a representative of confessional poetry. It presented American spiritual civilization and universality for life from the late 1950s to 1960s. It dealt with the subject of the poet's private life under the psychological pressure. Lowell described his distinctive vision of the relationship of painful world and suffering self in his poetry. An important feature of his confessional poems was the criticism on modern civilization by means of characterization. Life Studies was written as a kind of therapy to overcome his early trauma, as well as the social problems of contemporary Americans which Lowell was confronted with. Through his personal experiences, Lowell exposed and judged the collapse of traditional value and moral confusion in the society. Therefore, he is a poet who opened his own world of poetry with his poetic achievements.