Gang Socheon left us 260 or so children’s songs and children’s poems and also 140 or so children’s stories and juvenile novels with his creation activities for about 30 years. In the initial period of his entrance to the platform, he mainly created children’s songs and children’s poems, but after 1939, he widened the range of his creation to children’s stories and juvenile novels, which influenced the development of Korean children’s literature significantly.
Gang Socheon is often acknowledged as a poet who exploited the children’s poems of the modern sense along with Pak Mokwol breaking down the conventional patterns of early Korean children’s poems. Despite this, advanced research on Gang Socheon is mostly focused on the genre of children’s stories, and research on his children’s poems is very rare. Besides, existing research often includes the contents that are different from the facts and takes as its subjects the collections of poems that are not the originals published then or works contained in complete collections; thus, it is hard to figure out his poetic world accurately.
Thereupon, this researcher excavates and analyzes 52 works of Gang Socheon’s published in the 1930’s in order to examine the characteristics of his children’s poems in the beginning of his entrance to the platform and their significance in literary history. As a result, in terms of contents, Gang Socheon’s children’s poems published in the 1930’s include works dealing with various subjects including the actual problems to the world of children’s innocence. It has been found that there are a lot of works created through the thinking of children’s stories as well as intuitive correspondences to objects.
Also, formally, they maintain the frame of the children’s rhymed verse in the 1920’s and also pursue various poetic alterations through children’s free verse at the same time. In particular, Gang Socheon’s children’s poems published after the mid-1930’s include a lot of works created by using the question and answer method. This kind of creational method using the question and answer method contributes greatly to inducing dramatic effects to his works. Moreover, by creating new forms of poetry differentiated from existing children’s poems’, he made a chance to secure his own poetic uniqueness.
In conclusion, it seems that Gang Socheon did figure out the ultimate difference between children’s rhymed verse emphasizing the elements of songs and children’s free verse valuing poetic elements very early. This is because his children’s poems published after the mid-1930’s still show this kind of aspect, too. From this point, Gang Socheon can be said to be a poet that did create his own unique world of poetry through restless renewals continuing the legacy of children’s rhymed verse in the 1920’s and also pursuing children’s free verse additionally.