The purpose of this study was to investigate the patterns of mourning being manifested in the poetry of Kim Jongsam. His poems take a particular position in the modernism of the 1950s. They are distinguished from the traditional lyric poems in the 1950s, the modernist poems trying to deal with the changes of the times, and the participatory poems that took active interest in the reality after Korean War. Those characteristics come from the patterns of mourning, which is his reaction to loss, being actively manifested in his poems. In his paper titled "Mourning and Depression," Freud presented two kinds of reaction to loss; unlike those who experience common mourning to accept the absence of someone lost and resolve conflicts through grief, those who suffer depression keep letting someone lost inside them and deny the loss. Kristeva segmented such a particular reaction process; those who suffer narcissistic depression take the event of loss as a more primitive loss of the object. As a result, the loss of the object becomes the loss of the world and remains as a chose that cannot be easily sublimated into a symbol or metaphor. A juxtaposition or substitution metaphor is used in a process of such a situation being organized with poetic language, and that is a way of mourning by an ego that is not capable of viewing the world as a whole and reflecting itself. Kim's poems are comprised of the images created by calling the object absent in reality through a diaphora. Their characteristics, namely "death consciousness," "fantasy," and "embodiment of absence," are the results of such mourning patterns being poetically manifested since what he experiences through the loss of the object is the loss of something primitive present beyond concrete reality. What he confines inside himself, denies whose loss, and takes care of represents fundamental nothingness about existence. Thus such a world is not a passive reaction containing a death impulse but an active one in that it does not give up fundamental desire for existence and refuses to forget the loss. The study found that Kim's poems would claim more persuasive power when the uniqueness of his world view was understood in the aspect of mourning for loss. They become beautiful when things that are absent are embodied and organized with images. Such aesthetic embodiment succeeds thanks to his mourning attitude toward the lost world.

• 김경은(아주대학교 국어국문학과) | Kim Kyoung-Eun