SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This thesis is primarily a critical approach to the actual processes of the making of early modern Korean poetry during the period 1896-1929. This period, in which the age-old traditions of poetic songs gave way to the vastly different modes of modern poetry, involves several crucial questions, the correct answers to which are essential to an understanding of the nature and characteristics of modern Korean poetry. The discussion in this thesis centres on clarifying how or by what and by whose efforts early modern poetry was evolved and enriched, and to what extent.It is a study of first-hand materials, much of which has been unknown to, or neglected by previous scholarship, in which more than two thousand poems have been examined. Of these, about one hundred poems are analysed for their poetic quality and assessed for their significance in the development of modem poetry. Some of the best and most significant have not hitherto been accorded their rightful place in the history of poetry in Korea.