How Poetry Mattered in 1920s Korea

This study of poetry and publishing in 1920s Korea explores the crucial relationship between the material production of poetry and how poetry matters. Scholars of Korean literature have largely ignored the mechanical and societal processes of literary production during this period. They have also overlooked how the specific bibliographic resources of a poetic text can contribute to what it means. To address these twin problems, detailed bibliographic surveys of forty-five individual copies of vernacular Korean poetry titles and thirty-eight issues of ten vernacular periodicals produced between 1920 and 1929 are presented. These contextualize and support a case study of the poetry of Kim So-wo l (1902-1934) that aims to understand his work in the variety of bibliographic contexts in which it appears, including a recently rediscovered alternate presentation of his canonical Chindallaekkot (Azaleas).