Seo JeongJu’s poetic journey can be said to be the most special case to seek the modernity in the ‘post-modern’ way. Modernity and aesthetic modernity of Seo JeongJu’s poetry shows how he approached to the modernity of Korean modern poetry in the ‘post-modern’ way. This paper aims to analyze the problem of modernity achieved by Seo JeongJu’s poetry focusing change of attention to the natural subjects. For him, ‘the nature’ is an imaginative metaphor located on the opposite side of history and the real world which he tried to remove. Such an attitude toward the nature is clarified by the location of ‘attention’ of the poetical agent toward the nature in the poetry. If aesthetic modernity in Seo JeongJu’s poetry is involved in the invention of poetical agents surrounding ‘the aesthetic nature’, it is the location and distance of the poetical agent toward the nature which enables it. This paper tried to expose a certain point of aesthetic modernity of Seo JeongJu’s poetry by analyzing the status of the poetical agent toward the nature in Seo JeongJu’s poetry.
The adventure of attention shown in his initial poetry is to break down the status of the poetical agent about the landscape and to go through with physical devotion toward the natural subjects. Such a behavior is characterized as an attention to trace the desire in space swaying with senses. The poetry in his early days goes against the general experience of the modern agents, and creates ‘lifted agents’ in a way of physical devotion.’ The first-person agent appears not as an observer of ‘the space of senses’, but a body to devote to the space. Here, adjustment of distance of the attention toward the landscape is broken down. Such an aspect to convert the poetry of landscape into the poetry of events is an aesthetic particularity of his poetry in the early days. His poetry in the later days reaches identification with the nature and glance of the eternal time. Now, the nature is able to exist as a metaphor of a philosophical view of the world and the mythology of eternity. Now, the agents in the poetry stand from the transcendental point of view of the Creator who creates the landscape, not to find the landscape. The nature becomes a subjective constituent and equivalent creature of the spirit and awareness of the poetical agents perfectly. This can be seen as to beautify the perfect self’s control over the nature in an abstract horizon. In the later poetry, the nature removes the sense of its objective reality by being returned to the symbol of mythology, the eternity. It can be said that modernity and post-modernity of Seo JeongJu’s aesthetics conflict over each other here.
Attention in his poetry is not to follow the universal structure of modern agents, but to arrive at aesthetic modernity which achieves aesthetic individuality in the point where the attention is dislocated from the structure. It can be said that Seo JeongJu has made a place of aesthetic modernity which cuts across the modernity and post-modernity in the sharpest way. To expose that such a thing has been done as an adventure of attention toward the nature is one of several ways to understand Seo JeongJu’s poetical modernity in detail.