earticle

영어

This manuscript is to study the natural images of Lee Dong-joo's traditional poems together with origins of his poetic spirit, which I think is an essential part of our efforts to understand the identity of Korean contemporary poems. I think that trying to search into aesthetic consciousness of our poetic sentiments will help us a lot in understanding the roots of Korean contemporary poems under the ever-desolating modern life caused by the effects of industrial dehumanization with warm human love and affection getting deprived of our daily life.
To the poet, Lee Dong-joo, nature itself is the source of vitality in human life. He regards human life itself as part of Mother Nature and he expresses all kinds of emotions, such as joy, anger, sorrow and pleasure by resorting to the nature. In other words, the fusion of the poet into the objects which come to the mental abyss of the author, whatever it may be a loss or longing for the home, may reunite itself into the nature while bringing the dark side of his own life to
amalgamate in harmonious oneness with nature.
To make it a roundabout expression, poetic ego doesn't stop under the pressure of heavy pains in a real life, but it reveals its direction to seek after any exodus or change apart from it. Therefore, his poetic object would come to accumulate its depth of love in a positive atmosphere rather than a negative one. Even the trivial things in the nature, such as one piece of withered grass, pebbles, tree roots and so forth would become the exit to purify his turbid mind and also become the object of hope upgrading his life into a higher level.
This aspect has much to do with life problems of the poet, Lee Dong-joo. We can find one record saying that he suffered from the downfall of his own family during early childhood and this could mean outer circumstances of his childhood had any effect upon his poetic world. As one might put it another way, any depressed complexes out of empty loss of mind had been projected outwardly. This shows its deep relationship with Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis. Psychological development process of S. Freud shows there is a projection or expansion of one's personal emotions or experiences into his or her history of psychological development process and therefore, in this respect we could say that heartburning, grudge or despair in poems of Lee Dong-joo might be due to this kind of mental characteristics. As such, Lee Dong-joo purified problems of life through a natural consciousness and opened a channel of empathy and sympathy between the poet and readers beyond the distance of limited time and space. He
lead us into the way for harmony and compatibility uniting inner conflicts or agonies in a human mind with the nature or he provided the space in which we can solve impracticable and negative things by uniting them with the nature.
We could say that this is a kind of consolation generated out of the combination with the object world. Since the nature like the sky, clouds, the earth, flowers are being used as a celestial symbol or image, they become, though invisible, magnificent objects for the poet to depend
upon and it refreshes the tired spirit of the author taking the role of a redeemer. Therefore, the dreams the poet longed for didn't die away but it is still alive and furthermore his tragic outlook on the world takes the positive role of generating the vitality forces, dissolving the pains and
reuniting it with the positive forces rising above the world of life and death. As this, the nature to the poet, Lee Dong-joo does not exist independently of human consciousness, but it comes to him in the unity and oneness of human beings and natural objects and its common sense
of solidarity appears as a resolute will to appease and smooth down the desolated harsh realties in life.
Lee Dong-joo's nature is not an object by which one would express anger or escape from the harsh reality, but it comes as one of symbolic silent languages uniting the nature and the mind into oneness under the atmosphere in which one contemplates all the worldly desires in a far
detached manner.