The Sinshiron coterie was formed to go beyond the achievements and limits of Korean modernist poetry of the 1930s and sought a new world of poetry in response to the post-liberation changing environment. They published their first poetry magazine Sinshiron in 1948 and their second coterie magazine A New City and the Chorus of Citizens in 1949. However, the Sinshiron has not been discovered until recently, and thus the previous studies on Sinshiron have mainly relied on the latter magazine. Most of those studies regard ‘Sinshiron’ as a modernist coterie and view the coterie as predecessor or prototype of the ‘Hubangi’ coterie, with emphasis on the facts that the magazine A New City and the Chorus of Citizens was a modernism-oriented coterie magazine and that Kim Kyung-rin and Park In-hwan who organized and led the ‘Sinshiron’ coterie claimed to stand for modernism. Now, however, such a point of view requires modification after the first issue of Sinshiron was recently found. Actually, the magazine contains a large number of poems that stand for engaged realism and the coterie members also appear to have had a realistic tendency. In fact, during its early stage, the Sinshiron coterie had a membership of both realist and modernist writers, but it was later disorganized due to increased ideologicalconflict between two groups. After that, the ‘Hubangi’ coterie was formed by Kim Kyung-rin and Park In-hwan, who played a leading role in the Korean modernism of the 1950s. In Korean modernism, the ‘Sinshiron’ coterie's group-based poetry movement allows us to get an overall view of modernist poetry activities of the 1930s and 1950s and has a considerable significance in that they greatly influenced the modernism of the 1950s.
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