Young-Jun Lee

 10.18399/acta.2015.18.1.009

sovereignty of language silence death chiasmus binary opposition immanence revolution poetic ideal political vision

This essay examines Kim Suyŏng’s poems with the focus on their aesthetic ontology and corresponding literary forms in their historical context. In contrast to previous scholarship, which portrays Kim Suyŏng as either a political realist or a modernist within a narrowly defined political reading, with the assumption that his poetry was completely changed after the April Revolution in 1960, my study places his poetry in a broader cultural and historical context, demonstrating that his poetic ideal is the retrieval of an ultimate subjectivity or sovereignty of the imagination immanent in vernacular Korean, throughout his poetic career. My analysis of Kim Suyŏng’s works reveals how he pursued a poetic vision of sovereignty often threatened not only by colonization and subsequent national division, but also by compressed modernization. Moreover, my reading of his poetry demonstrates how Kim Suyŏng fundamentally changed the understanding of language from a vehicle of communicative meaning to a form of ultimate imagination. My study explains how he equated a poetic ideal with a political vision without sacrificing either the existential complexities of an individual or a social reality.