청산과 바다를 넘는 시선 - 정지용 시에 나타난 전통 자연 기호의 근대적 재배치 -

초록

Jeong Ji-yong has often been regarded as a poet who creatively transforms and redeploys conventional poetic form. His work is remarkable in the way it reveals a persistent effort to bridge tradition and modernity. This paper explores a poet’s mode of appropriating tradition by tracing how he reconfigures two major motifs, seas and mountains. In the poems “Hometown” (1932), “Straits Again” (1935), and “The Sea of Galilee” (1933), the sea is stripped of its status as a spatial beyond and reorganized as a stage of modern time that shapes the speaker’s everyday life and interiority. In “Tiger Butterfly” (1941), the Jade green mountains are no longer a space of awe, as it is in classical poetry, but is transformed into a scene where the modern theme of double suicide unfolds and where life and death intersect. This transformation is further deepened in “Baengnokdam” (1939). Through the modern experience of bodily exhaustion at the limit, the mountain summit is stripped of its sacred status as an object of reverence, and classical nature motifs are redistributed as sensuous material rather than abstract symbols. Rather than severing ties with tradition, the poet shifts spatial signifiers into temporal ones by endowing inherited poetic diction with contemporary meanings. This strategy resonates with Calinescu’s observation that the concept of utopia, initially spatial in character, is redefined in modernity in predominantly temporal terms. Jeong was a poet who, without being bound by classical conventions, re-created the value of traditional poetic language within the present.

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