The reality faced by the postwar generation writers was a situation of an ideological confrontation between linguistic hybrids and cultural boundaries. After the experience of extreme fear called a war, a thorough denial of the existing values took place. Within the existential worries, the writers of modernism became immersed in an agony about the “modernity” of having to establish anew a modern era not by using traditional parochial languages but with a new language of “intelligence.” It can be argued that, more than anything, Park In-hwan came to encounter a lot of modern books as he ran Mariseosa Bookstore and that his agony about the “modernity” became more intense. However, living in an era of dual languages of Korean and Japanese, his poems were fraught with crude style translations, in other words, Japanese style Chinese characters. Moreover, his worship of the Western books drove his ideology to “notions” and a “world of discernment,” his poetry soon became filled with notational and abstract words. However, the Korean language as such an artificial language and translation-style language was an “intellectual” pursuit of succeeding into the history of Korean literature the new culture of the time as a new “cultural language.”
Kanji translations, new notational language and the world of discernment, and the expansion of ambiguous symbols and images illustrate to us a new aesthetic modernity as a resistance to the world of traditional poetry of the time. The symbolic world and decadent mood have become an opportunity for drawing in Park In-hwan’s poetry into a world of aesthetics and the site of secular simultaneity of poetry. Ultimately, through all this, Park In-hwan wanted to secure modernity of poetry within a changing society.