The world of Kim Jong Sam's poetry is considered to show a relatively moderate changes in his poetic gradation than other poets. However, his unrevealed poetic world is operated by a intense wave of inner transition. This transition is one of the core intensive quest for Kim's poetry, and it is the starting point of his poetic journey that consistently exposes his mind of escape and wandering. Kim Jong Sam is a poet who never had been distracted by any of the social phenomena, social chaos, nor the trend of poetical circles of his time. That's why Kim's poetic world is dealt as the sphere of a great literary art that holds contestable debates and variety of possibility in interpretations.
Kim's poetry is frequently evaluated to be abstruse to understand. It is on account of his usage of implication such as ellipses and symbols in his poetries. One of the images that comprehends Kim's poetic characteristics most exquisitely, is the image of sound. To put it simply, there are two aspects of sound image in his poetic world: one is the image of the acoustic sense of sound that actually "reaches one's ear", and the other one is the image of musical sense of sound. The sound that reaches one's ear could be generally noted as the search for sound(outer world), in other words, a yearning for the unknown world. This is the first stage that Kim communicates with the world through the medium of sound.
The second stage of communication is the recognition of the perceived sound which has an incomplete form of severance and continuance. This recognition of the sound is aroused from the negative perspective on the reality, and it begets the continuous discord and conflict. The discord and conflict is at last resolved and purified though the sound image of "music". Music is the inductive mechanism for Kim to get an artistic inspiration and to be led to the world of self-conquest. The search for sound, the encounter of continuance and severance, and the world of self-conquest through the musical reasoning is the significant symbol which Kim's poetic image of sound is containing. The changes in his poetic gradation is the process of poetic search and the journey heading toward the self-conquest.