In Korea

The literati of Korea shared the poetic tradition of China completely, and their poems cannot easily be distinguished from those written by Chinese scholars. Out of the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of poems written in Chinese characters in Korea over the centuries, Professor Kim Jong-gil has made English translations of a tiny representative selection in his Slow Chrysanthemums (Anvil, 1987) and he stresses how the Korean poems reflect at times the specific qualities of the Korean landscape, with its vast areas of forested hills, and evoke questions that were issues in the Korean society of their time. Already at this time, nature was not a self-contained topic but was always associated with the life of society.

In the 15th century, an alphabet known as hangul (phonetic symbols as opposed to ideogrammes) was invented to allow the complex sounds of the Korean language to be transcribed. Korean Confucians had already developed a form of poetry in the Korean language some two hundred years before this. There is, however, virtually no surviving trace of an autonomous vernacular poetic tradition existing before the 13th century, except for a number of isolated older songs (hyang-ga) and until the nineteenth century Chinese character poetry reigned supreme.

In the 13-14th centuries literati developed the poetic form known as Sijo in which the Korean language was used, the syllables were counted in a fairly fixed form with three lines of 12-15 syllables each, there being regular syllabic clusters (e.g. 3-4-3-4 or 3-5-4-3) within each line and the third line always starting with a 3-5 cluster. The topics were at first little different from those found in the Chinese poems (separation, longing, leisure, drinking, loyalty) but as the Yi Dynasty grew more and more corrupt and slowly lost control of the country in the 18th century, the sijo became popular at a more general level since it could be written in the Korean hangul that most scholars despised because anyone, even women, could learn to write it in only a few minutes.

The rules about the number of syllables, diction, and proper subjects relaxed and disappeared until by the 19th century the sasul sijo had become a popular stanzaic song form. Its rhythms were completely free verse, its diction was the popular language, and it became a means of protest against economic oppression, official corruption, hypocritical morality. Many of these poems use coarse, physical language, deal with erotic and comic subjects, in an attempt to express a longing for greater freedom and simple human dignity.