영·미 모더니즘 시와 한국 모더니즘 시 비교연구: T. S. 엘리엇과 김기림

A Comparative Study of Anglo-American and Korean Modernist Poetry: T. S. Eliot and Ki-Rim Kim

This paper investigates “almost the same, but not quite” modernisms between T. S. Eliot(1888~1965) and Ki-Rim Kim(1905~?). Previous formalistic readings of the influence of Eliot on Kim ignore the difference, for example, between the Eliot of 1946 who proposed the world literature and the unity of European culture based on the ideal Roman Empire and Christendom and the Kim of 1946 who asserted (inter-)national literature based on the world-wide solidarity among the oppressed peoples and nations. The previous readings have foregrounded Kim’s misreading or misunderstanding of Eliot and its consequent failure in the making of his long poem―The Weather Chart(『기상도』), with the result that Kim has often been labeled as an abortive imitator of Eliot or a free-floating cosmopolitan who had no historical sense. Bracketing these types of critiques, this paper claims that, despite the would-be similarities of formal features between Eliot and Kim in particular and Anglo-American and Korean modernism in general, the modernism of the colonizing nations and that of the colonized cannot be compared in an ahistorical vacuum. To illustrate the claim, this paper re-traces Kim's critical readings of Eliot from 1933 to 1950 chronologically and brings to light that Kim had consistently devaluated Eliot's conservative cultural politics or his prescriptions to the waste land while revaluating his literary techniques expressing the modern situation, and that he had not unsuccessfully imitated but critically refracted Eliot, The Waste Land(1922) and Anglo-American modernist poetry in the colonial and post-colonial contexts.