Ports of Call: A Maritime Study of Korean Modernist Poetry

Abstract: This essay undertakes a survey of Korean modernist poetry in miniature by means of a singular motif—the seaport (hanggu)—in whose tidal vortex the politics and poetics of the Korean Peninsula were recalibrated at the outset of the modern age, specifically the years submerged in the depths of Japanese colonial rule (1910–45). While the essay's comparison between Kim Ch'ang-sul's (1903–50) and Chŏng Chi-yong's (1902–50) 1920s-era modernist aesthetics of dockside labor and harbor construction foregrounds an oscillation between proletarian collectivity and depoliticized solipsism, the pairing of Im Hwa (1908–53) and O Chang-hwan (1918–51) elucidates the divergent vectors of utopian deferral and fatalistic anomie constituting two incommensurable critical standpoints from which to confront the objective upsurge in seaport modernization and industrialization in the late 1930s.