김기림은 스티븐 스펜더의 시를 어떻게 읽었는가?

How Did Ki-Rim Kim Read Stephen Spender"s Poetry?

  This paper studies Ki-Rim Kim’s reception and transformation of Stephen Spender’s poetry along with W. H. Auden’s and C. Day Lewis’s during the 1930s and 1940s. Since November 1934, Kim had contrasted Eliot"s conservative politics and passive description of the status quo of the present waste land to Spender’s revolutionary politics, critique of Nazism and Fascism and active struggle to make a new society. Especially, Kim adopted the Auden-generation poets as an alternative to T. S. Eliot with emphasis on their revolutionary poetry and politics and transformed them in the colonial context. Section Ⅱ examines one of the major problems of the previous formalistic studies which have focused on similarities between the two poets in terms of such subject matters as the “train”; Section Ⅲ traces Kim’s reading of Spender, Auden, and Day Lewis and reveals the significance of his reading in the colonial context. In doing so, this paper argues that Kim while receiving their revolutionary poetry and politics did not simply imitate but transform them in the process of de-colonialization, and that it is necessary to re-conceptualize “modernity” and “modernism” in the study of the influence of Anglo-American modernist poetry on Korean modernist poetry.