정지용 시의 가톨리시즘 연구

Abstract

Jeong Ji-Yong is a poet who made a significant stroke for the flow of modern Korean poem through his enormous poems. He wrote not only works containing the spirit and energy of soul and thought affected by the times but also poetries exploring the essence of modern poems based on the thorough awareness of poetic diction. He established the firm basis of imagism or modernism and engrafted Catholicism and traditional Oriental thoughts into poems as well. When we look into the world of Ji-Yong's poems, we can find out his poems belonging to modernism in his early days, to Catholicism in his middle years and to tradition in his later times. The history of modern Korean literature has mainly light on his poetic literature focusing on Ji-Yong's modernism and tradition poems. However, his Catholicism poems thought not to be remarkable lie in an important position to connect Ji-Yong's early poems and later ones. It is not only because he started writing Catholicism poems to reflect on modernism poems and to overcome his life in those days, also because he attempted to express what religion could not make him overcome with traditional thoughts. Ji-Yong came to have religious belief to overcome the grief and unstable consciousness for his adversary times, which in turn affected his poetic world. In addition, Ji-Yong came to write Catholicism poems to reflect on his early poems. He tried to get over the absence of the nature of thoughts with Catholicism poems containing the religious spirit as his early poems had remained only in the feelings and images. This is the very reason that Ji-Yong wrote Catholicism poems. Major contents of Catholicism poems dealt with praises to God, grief of life and the will to overcome the recognition of death. Ji-Yong's catholic belief is contained here. Ji-Yong's Catholicism poems formed belief into literature through the way of allusion and symbol. He used the subjects from the Bible to express his belief in many cases. The way of expressing the Holy spirit through the symbol of fire and light often appears in Ji-Yong's Catholicism poems. The image of brightness and ascension from fire is connected to God.