• (The)Study of the Eastern Classic
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• no.49
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• pp.225-260
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• 2012

The poetry of Haseo Jo Gyeong is first characterized by its fantasy content with mysterious and strange beings such as mountain wizards, gods of flowers, ghosts, Jujos and dragons. Such works imply the huge gap between his political ideal of Neo-Confucianism and the reality of society and are expressions of his resulting sorrow. Of course, he did not just look at reality pessimistically. Like other Neo-Confucianism scholars, he used the symbol of "spring" in his poems, which indicates that he did have optimistic belief in the world in spite of despair. In his poems, the symbol of "spring" implies the political world where the noble man grabbed the power and the sinister groups were extracted or the world where the political ethics of Neo-Confucianism was implemented. His works depicting the essence of natural objects, mountains, and rivers exhibit the characteristics of his poetry more clearly. He described the law of the universe behind natural objects and the vibrant aspects of natural objects by depicting their movements in a clear and sharp manner. Unlike the old Neo-Confucianism scholars that often created poems on the topic of acquirement of natural law and nature, he expanded his poetic world in a direction of revealing the secrets of objects. His works describing the spirit of mountains and rivers are especially noteworthy in that they implied a life attitude of moving forward in an deteriorating world bravely by manifesting strong and dynamic power. Paying attention to the secrets of natural objects, Haseo displayed his life ideal in richer ways by painting the new forms of ume flowers. Unlike the old ume flowers poems in the past, his ume flowers poems present ume flowers as ascetics that obtained truth, men of virtue that inspired contemporary people, or retired gentlemen that revealed the profound secrets of nature. While it is unique that he manifested the forms of ume flowers in ascetics and men of virtue while perceiving the dark reality of society, it is more noteworthy that he described ume flowers as the beings revealing the profound secrets of nature. It was the expression of his yearning for an innocent personality and his fear for losing the personality, clearly depicting a human form of his ego. He created a more human and realistic personality ideal by embracing the contemporary thinking based on the profound secrets of nature in his Dohak poetry[道學詩], which is a significant achievement in that it showed new changes to Dohak poetry in the 18th century.