Modern poetry begins in Korea: Historical background

The role of poetry in the last 100 years of Korean history is equally important in explaining why Koreans do not read poetry in the same way as Europeans. Put in the simplest terms, few countries have been subjected to the threat of total cultural annihilation as Korea was. Just over one hundred years ago, after being a closed "Hermit Kingdom" for centuries, Korea was forced to open to the outside world as its society collapsed. The "outside world" in Korea means China, Russia, Japan, with the European powers and the United States jittery in the background.

Of the three powers, at the turn of this century China was collapsing, Russia's centre of interest was far from Korea, while Japan was efficiently modernizing and arming itself, inspired by its contacts with Prussia to see big. In 1894 the open-minded, pro-western queen Min was murdered by Japanese soldiers at the instigation of her father-in-law, who was equally responsible for the slaughter of thousands of Catholics in the 1860s. At the same time, peasants in the south-western rural areas were in revolt, partly against official corruption, but also against incoming western notions about science, technology, and religion. Japan used all of this to take over a very shaken country with little resistance.

After 1895, Korea was virtually run by the Japanese. That reform and modernisation were needed had been a common theme of such great scholars as Tasan at the start of the 19th century, but they came now imposed from outside, accompanied by every kind of humiliation. It was as though the entire legacy of the past, and not just the corruptions and inefficiencies, had been disqualified by contact with the outside world. There seemed no way in which the traditional culture could adapt, there had to be a new beginning and in poetry that meant looking for new themes and new styles.

That search comes within a culture where, as has been seen, poetry is expected to be the finest expression of thoughts about good government and inner virtue, a verbal image of harmony, a subtle mirror to vice, an icon guiding a people towards essential goodness. Some poets tried to advocate reforms in poems written in older styles, or in styles renewed by reference to the old. At the same time, there was for the first time contact with the modern poetry of the West; a very small number could read the original English or French but for most the encounter came in Japanese translations. The contrast, the difference was appalling. Confidence in the value of what Korean poetry had been doing dissolved. If poetry should be like this...
Modern Korean poetry begins: poets and poems

Virginia Woolf once declared that "On or about December 1910 human nature changed" but from a Korean point of view the date should be two years before. In 1908, an eighteen-year old called Choi Nam Son published a poem "From the Sea to a Boy". It is not a particularly wonderful poem but it stands as a landmark in the search for a new poetic expression (this whole trend is called 'the new poetry') using the vernacular in a free and idiomatic way to say things that had not been said before:

tcho---l sok, tcho---l sok, tchok, schwa---a
Rushing, smashing, crushing
Hills like great mountains, rocks like houses: What are they? What are they?
Roaring: Do you know, don't you know, my great might?
Rushing, smashing, crushing,
tcho---l sok, tcho---l sok, tchok, schwa---a

Rather like Sir Philip Sidney impressed by French and Italian, Choi was trying to show that the native Korean language could do poetry as well as any other. The language, but divorced from almost all the poetry previously written in Korea. Nature is still at the centre, though, as it very often was in the earlier Chinese verses, and as there Nature is not present for its own sake but as an image of the world in which human life is set. The vastness of ocean and sky, the flow of rivers, the steadfast power of mountains, were all topoi connected with implicit themes of government, power, time and eternity.

By 1908, the Korean language had already become a symbol of a threatened national identity. The task of raising up the dignity of the language in a new poetic activity was a paradigm of the message many other writers expressed in directly didactic poems on the importance of reform combined with the need to defend the nation.

For centuries, Korea had been an independant, unified state ruled by a king who recognized the superior standing of the emperor in Peking and sent regular tributes. The Korean king sacrificed to the Earth, only the Chinese emperor offered the sacrifice to Heaven. Under Japanese pressure, in the 1890s Korea broke with China and began to call its king "emperor" in the Japanese style. He even offered sacrifices to Heaven, but he soon had no power left, being made to abdicate in 1907 after he tried to tell the West what Japan was up to. In 1910 Korea was finally taken over by Japan, whose ultimate policy was to expand from there throughout China and Siberia.

Japan had been open to the West (the Meiji Reform) for thirty years before Korea began to move in the same direction. The Japanese solution for the Korean Problem was quite simple, the Koreans must become Japanese. All Korean-language newspapers and journals were banned. Almost all schools were closed. Several hundred thousand copies of text books, history books, and others, that indicated that Korea had an independent past and had previously resisted Japanese invasions, were destroyed. All education that continued was to be given in Japanese, which became the official government language. School-teachers were to wear Japanese police uniforms. Koreans had to take Japanese names and stop writing or publishing in any language but Japanese. The traditional culture was to be obliterated and all sense of national identity or national pride was to be demolished.