The Poetics of Gender in W. B. Yeats and Kim Chunsoo

I examine two Modernist poets, Kim Chunsoo of Korea and W. B. Yeats of Ireland. I read some poems by Kim Chunsoo with the imagery of women. His poems tend to be short and abstract. From the earliest poems to the last, the poet hardly talks about a woman, and instead he sings of what she could be as girl or woman. His poems of women read like Yeats’s early poems. Kim avoids dealing with the women directly, while Yeats, except for the early poems, talks about the women he has known in person. Like Kim, Yeats tends to universalize the women he knew; in the poems he usually begins with the real woman, then expands the horizon to all women, to the mythic and historical dimensions. The abstract portrayal of women in Kim’s poetry is seen as Eastern poetics, and the concrete depiction of women in Yeats’s poetry as Western. But both show interest in elements of the world, like water.