This article is to take a view of the historical significance of teenager poems during the Korean War in Korean Literature, especially in Korean Teenager Poems Vol. 1, a collection of the Academic literary awards, focused on the narratives of rhetoric of realistic time and space.
Teenager poems during the war are so familiar that they are literary texts written not by adults but by young people. They are easy to be approached for evoking sympathy in linguistic forms and give their views of the world through their thinking system. It is a surprise because of the images of urgent and hopeless war. It introduces the question for combination and understanding. The following is a summary of the body of this article.
First, I look into the context of teenager poems during the war at the aspect of an ‘odyssey’. This is not the deductive methodology but pays attention to how the poems make poetic expressions in time and space during the war. There are three types of poems which are about what have special perception of reality, what trace the context of life in intrinsic reality, and what have remarkable emotional responses along with self-identity problems at the period of adolescence.
Second, above all, there are a few poems presented perception of reality during the war. But they are significant that after penetrating tensions between reality which exists and reality which has to be, are records of determination stitching up seriously reality and hope. While weaving the historical reality leading astray, their works go down the bottom of suffering and wish ‘the flag’ and ‘the day’. This power in perception of reality comes from teenagers’ poetic expressions.
Third, it is another odyssey that teenager poems during the war reveal through so-called ‘moral’ works looking at the intrinsic reality. There are not only the poetic themes of good relations among people or co-existence with nature, but also apparatus which acquires the intrinsic realities during the war. Those kinds of realities are the colorful weaving from the poems.
Fourth, the last odyssey is the poems which have remarkable emotional responses and narratives of taking a detour. They reveal personal lyricism made of many materials like a sense of season, sorrows and dreams. ‘Detouring narratives’ would make the burden for teenagers who are growing up in the brutal world and soon become the member of the world. But it could be rather sincere and clear poetic expression in hard days of war and in the context of emotional adolescence. It could make them a step forward.
The teenager poems during the war originated in a state of tension between the unquestionable life and the questionable life and we could have a look at the properties which result from setting adolescence in the war time. We have searched a weather chart where landscapes could be presented specifically inside and outside through the poetic expressions of realistic time and space beyond the war. Most of all, the discovery of the bright aspects of teenage poems and the power of devoting oneself to detecting the life is significant for contributing to deepening the social meaning in Korean teenager literature.