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This study aims at exploring an aspect of aesthetic modernity in poems in the early and late 1950s by analyzing the rhetoric in poems by poet Cho Hyang in 󰡔Collection of Problematic Poems After Korean War󰡕. Cho Hyang experimented Korean language in a very avant-garde language and concentrated on breaking away from grammar and custom of traditional lyric poetry and writing surrealistic poems. The rhetoric of poet Cho Hyang stems from metaphor based on principles of difference rather than principles of similarity. Difference of metaphor in Cho Hyang's poems gradually adding to depth becomes metaphor and metonymy and finally emerges as dépaysement and calligrammes at an extreme spot. The transformation of poet Cho Hyang in terms of poetic rhetoric comes from his aesthetic position of breaking away from traditional lyric poetry which dominated Korean poetic community till the early 1950s and building the late 1950s on aesthetic modernity of surrealism. However, I am somewhat skeptical about whether Cho Hyang successfully accomplished aesthetic and ethical tasks which he gave to himself. While Cho Hyang consciously experimented the rhetoric of surrealism to sever relations with traditional aesthetics of lyric poetry and realize poetic modernity, I find it difficult to think that he invented his own creative rhetoric free from the influence of rhetoric from the epicenter of surrealism. He consciously accepted aesthetics and rhetoric of surrealism actively, but he leaves something missing in that he failed to thoroughly exclude sentimentalism as an aesthetic morality of a surrealist and did not create new aesthetic meanings. Experiment and failure of rhetoric in Cho Hyang's poems show both aesthetic meanings and limitations of the poet who attempted to perform ethical duty of overcoming dark reality as well as aesthetic task of realizing poetic modernity in Korean realities in the early and late 1950s when modernity was not yet matured.