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This article describes the generational perspectives revealed in the views of three Korean poets, representing three generations of poetic circles, through their appropriations of the Irish poet W B. Yeats, who experienced colonial rule as they did. Within the history of modern Korean poetry, Kim Ok (b. 1896) stands as a representative of the 1920s, Kim Kirim (b. 1908) of the 1930s, and Kim Suyöng (1921-1968) of the postcolonial years, especially the 1960s. Though different in their styles and perspectives, they shared the roles of poet, literary critic, and translator and were flagship figures in their respective eras. Looking into the works and poetics of these three poets is tantamount to exploring the history of modern Korean poetry spanning the period between the 1920s and 1960s. Drawing on the fact that all three poets were interested in translating and interpreting Yeats, this article aims to trace the genealogy of Korean modernist poetry by exploring the generational differences in their views on poetry through their mediation of Yeats.
Keywords: modernist Korean poetry, poetic genealogy, Kim Kirim, Kim Suyöng, W B. Yeats
I.Genealogy of Korean Modernist Poetic Circles and Generational Dispute
In and after the colonial period in Korea, modernist poetic circles established their genealogy in their own context, largely intertextualizing Western and Japanese modernist poetry. Within only three decades in the early 20th century, colonial Korea was exposed to literary currents similar to those that simultaneously rushed over imperial Japan. An array of historical and contemporary artistic and intellectual movements, such as Enlightenment rationalism, romanticism, Marxism, imagism, Anglo-American modernism, and futurism, arrived in Korea all at once instead of being introduced in turn as had happened in the Western world.
Song Uk, a Korean literary critic and historian from a new-critical background, systemized the artistic currents reflected in modern Korean poetry during the colonial period in his Sihak p'yongjon (Critical review of poetics) in 1963. He evaluated these currents as hasty, disoriented, and "incomplete"; for instance, he characterized Kim Kirim (b. 1908), a representative theorist of Korean modernist poetics, as a "poet devoid of internality and traditional awareness."1 Specifically, he argued that Kim's long modernist poem Kisangdo (The weather map) (1936), inspired by T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922), failed to convey the allusions...