Imagination, the most common, archetypal mental activity of the human mind, and now becoming a major issue of our era, related with the new sense of the times, has always been alive deep inside our minds, operating actively on our life. Nevertheless even in our society where the Confucian value of order was respected, as well as in the west where the traditional dichotomy of philosophy strictly divided emotion and reason, it has been underestimated as a peripheral value. From the beginning of the 20th century, however, the real value of imagination has been appreciated in earnest and positively: S. T. Coleridge, I. A. Richards, Gaston Bachelard, and Gilbert Durand analyzed it as a source of human mental activities and a power to create the unlimited world of emotion. Especially facing the rapidly changing period of technology starting from the latter part of the 20th century, we expect imagination will be the key to ‘the multimedia extension’ because it can combine contradictions, integrate homogeneous and heterogeneous elements, arouse sympathy, connect writers to readers through metaphor, symbolism, myth, allegory, and so forth, and further create brand new literary worlds. Discussions about imagination in the Modern Korean literature began with poetics of Kim, So-wol. His suggestion that poems are produced by poetic holy spirit transcending time and space seems very simple, but his point of view is important in that he recognized the power of imagination that departs from a usual and habitual way of looking, and destructs the dualism of things, Cheong, Ji-yong refused an artificial poetic methodology, connected imagination to the procedure of poetic creation which means he already knew the function of imagination to invent new worlds with language and to expand our cognitive base. Kim. Ki-rim argued on the importance of the scientific mind and the order of poems, introducing I. A. Richards and his theory of poems. His logic matters in that he inquired actively into the nature of imagination and endeavored to extend poetic language through constant contact with the spoken language at that time. As a literary critic, Song, Wook organized longstanding debates about imagination, and what is typical of him is to lay emphasis on the responsibility of poets by analyzing anew the theory of Coleridge. His point of view draws our attention since he showed a new way to understand Korean literature, and widened the world of criticism by vigorously accepting western literary works and theories on imagination. It is the power of imagination, the core of literary originality, that grows the seeds of universal themes in literature, like love, nature, fear, friendship, and exploration of types of human, into trees of diverse literary works. We can see every poet and novelist representing the Modern literature achieve excellency in the respect of various applications of imagination. Through the timeless process of recognizing personal past and present as an archetypal continuum of time by reconstructing the elements of personal novels, Seo, Jeong-ju told us the unchanging human conditions beyond his personal memories. He, in other words, pursued the harmony and oneness with the world through imagination. Meanwhile, the power of imagination may challenge the world and crave for differentiation from it. Imagination for difference introduces anti-poetic languages, destructs the convention of poems, and separates an individual self and the world, making the dissociation foregrounded by means of detachment of subject and object This kind of imagination rejects the traditional view of arts which has believed poems are an authentic art of language, and in doing so, it creates a new world. With the swift development of the multimedia period, there is a need for literature to communicate with more diverse media than before. The literary imagination is expected to find a way to communicate writing symbols with the other media, as well as writing symbols with their meanings, to meet the demands in a new era. There are four things to enable the literary imaginative power to play these roles. First of all, we need imagination on the spot: discarding the prejudice that imagination is only for the genius, and paying attention to the poets' creating procedures. Also imagination should be classified into diverse stratums to investigate the possibilities, if any. Second of all, we need omnidirectional imagination: actively introducing other media to the literature, and speculating about the complex, liberal imagination of the new generation that is not restricted in subject, and free from the convention of the genre. Thirdly, integrating imagination is needed: integrating emotion and reason will be the major role of imagination in this digital era to recover the relationships between people. Lastly, education of imagination for the next generation is necessary: literary imagination can make lonely and alienated people at this time identify themselves and can give the joy of experiencing creative activities Therefore, we should teach young people how to link reason and emotion in a literature class.