역사적 트라우마와 시: 아드리안 리치의 공동언어를 향한 소망

Historical Trauma and Poetry: Adrienne Rich’s Dream of a Common Language

Going through a historical trauma, it is more than necessary for us, poetry specialists, to think about what poetry can do in difficult times. For it has been an age-old argument that poetry is useless since it cannot do anything about global warfares, economic collapses, or growing nationalist agendas. Yet interestingly enough, people are turning to poetry as they collectively face difficult and challenging times. Probably it is because the emotional stability is just as significant as the physical settlement in a quasi-state of war when the world is chaotic and uncertain due to the global competitions for the necessities of life. Given, this paper reads Adrienne Rich’s An Atlas of the Difficult World and re-examines Rich’s idea of a poet’s integrity to take a responsibility for his/her poetry when engaging in the difficult world. Then, this paper reads the school among the ruins and Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth and illuminates her tenacious dream of a common language. After all, it is a poet, instead of politicians, who have a human eye to connect an individual’s emotions to those of global others and awaken us to the common language of humanity and thus help us restore human eyes to survive difficult and challenging times through the global solidarity of engaged citizens.