We can, as we have seen, infer some changed inquiry patterns, when we discussed 50’s poetry and 80-90’s poetry in the sequent perspective of ontology. We can, first of all, address a change in an attitude to pure idea.
Poets in the 1950s sought for pure being realized in the image of heaven, but poets in the 1980-90s change it into the image of the earth. In the 1950s, the invisible world, which has no substance but exists in idea and imagination was described in sacred language. Poets in the 80-90s vulgarize it in secular words and have a cynical attitude to the absolute world in which the former sacredly dreamed of unity, for reasons of artificiality. It means that the objects investigated in modern poems shift into existence, in other words, human and the secular world, from being.
The form of poems in the 1950s is comparatively short, graceful and noble, but that of poems in 1980-90s is entirely composed of slang, curses, ridicule, a superficial poetic words and a diffuse parody. The introduction of filthiness, disgust and obscenity is considered affirmative and causes ugliness to trespass on poetry breaking up a dichotomous framework of holiness and secularity, and beauty and ugliness. By doing so, the amplitude of formal esthetics is being broadened and the possibility to use ugliness in aesthetics is being opened. It can be regarded as the expansion of approaches and objects, which are to be inquired.
Poets in the 80-90s devote all their energies to the declination and annulment of existential hypocrisy and urban life in their poetry, The fights with existential hypocrisy are seen in Gi Hyeong-do’s fantastic substance, Choi Seung-ho’s annulment of being, Hwang Ji-woo’s contradiction of ideology, Yu ha’s urban hypocrisy, Ham Sung-ho’s ideal and artificial world, and Kim Un-hee’s false image of sexuality. The recent research, as we have seen, addresses the esthetics of negation, while still sojourning at the level of discovery. It is only one pattern of showing, not searching for a solution. Choi Seung-ho sings existential life with a free will in ‘ant’ but it doesn’t reach his excellent esthetics of negation, with Nitch’s superman not being seen. Though there is Hwang Ji-woo’s saying in his recent poem titled as ‘signal between people’ that poetry is not a message and result and ‘literature is a symptom, not diagnosis’, it can be concluded that the phase beyond existentialism to overcome the deconstruction and existential death has not yet come.
The present time is at the stage of ‘lion’ meaning negation. It seems so remote that we can arrive at the level of ‘little child’ to accept and reconcile the miserable condition of being. Affirmative existence resulting from synthesis through the developing process of negations by thesis and antithesis isn’t seen in their poems, yet.