심연수의 시세계와 문학사적 의의

Shim Yeon Soo’s Poetry and its Impact on the History of Literature

In this essay, I have examined the solitude and the spirit of resistance of Shim Yeon-su's poems, which constitute two most important parts of his poetry world. It has been found that Shim represents himself as a poetic speaker, whose identity has been formed based on the poet's own personality and his personal experiences. I also found that beneath the poet's profound solitude that prevails in the ethos in his works lies a sense of pilgrimage and a deep nostalgia for the betaken mother country. His lingering nostalgia is subtly concretized in such emotional expressions as a miss of the family and affection for woman. On the other hand, in his sense of resistance, the manly passions and the positive world view are strongly represented. Those emotions were probably formed by indirect influences of literary men he read and by the personal connections with fighters for national independence of that period like Yeo Un-heong. Overall, the solitude deeply felt in his earlier days seems to be overcome with the growth of a sense of resistance. Finally, the artistic significance of Shim's poems can summarized to three aspects: First, Shim was a nationalist poet who was agonized by and worried about the fate of the Korean nation and state. Second, Shim's works fill important lacuna made between 1940 and 1945 in the history of Korean literature. Shim was a Korean poet who wrote a number of poems in Korean, although mainly acting in the Manju area. In this respect, in the history of Korean literature, he can be paralleled with such famous resistant poets as Yi Yuk-sa and Yun Dong-ju. Third, consistent with the constitution of the sense of nationhood in Gando area of that time, Shim's works can also be incorporated into a history of Korean-Chinese literature.