A Study on the Verbal Perception and Expression of Life Ideas in the Poems of Han Yongwoon and Tagore

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine the perception and expression of the idea of life in Han Yongwoon’s The Silence of Nim and Tagore’s Gitanjiri. Not only are Han Yongwoon and Tagore rooted in Hinduism and one of its branches, Buddhism, worldviews that focus on the universal self (ātman) rather than the individual self, but they are also critical of modernity as represented by the West, as fellow Orientals and Members of colonized peoples. Thus, Han Yongwoon and Tagore pay attention to Eastern civilization, which seeks harmony and unity between the individual and the universe, rather than Western civilization, which emphasizes the autonomy and independence of the individual, distant from God, through possession and division. In these two collections of poems, all life is conditioned by the self, and both the individual and the universal of these parts are reduced to “God. In this case, the speaker, “I,” can identify the common principle of attaining truth through the process of seeking unity with “Nim,” who represents all these lives.