미당 서정주 시에 나타난 ‘바람’의 시적 변모 ― 비인간 행위자성을 중심으로

초록

This study examines the poetic transformation of “wind” in the poetry of Midang Seo Jeong-ju from the perspective of non-human agency. A survey of the Eunhaengnamu edition of The Complete Works of Seo Jeong-ju shows that, among approximately 950 poems from Hwasajip to Poems of an Eighty-Year-Old Boy Wanderer, 128 poems contain either the direct word “wind” or meteorological terms belonging to the 風 semantic field, with 183 occurrences in total. This suggests that “wind” is not an incidental natural image in Seo’s poetry, but a recurrent poetic word that runs through his poetic world. Focusing on five major poems—“Self-Portrait,” “Chucheonsa,” “Like the Wind That Has Met a Lotus and Gone,” “News by Way of the Wind,” and “The Best Thing in This World”—this study draws on Jane Bennett’s concepts of thing-power and assemblage to analyze how wind combines with human and non-human elements to produce poetic events. In the early poems, wind appears as an asymmetrical agent that occupies the place left by absent human caregivers and human will, thereby shaping the conditions of human life. In the middle-period poems, wind is transformed into an object of identification and orientation through which human speakers measure their own movement and modes of relation. In the later and late poems, wind no longer remains merely an object that humans seek to resemble. It becomes a medium of coexistence that mediates human promises and news, and helps constitute a lifeworld in which humans, animals, plants, and meteorological elements are placed together. This transformation shows that wind in Seo Jeong-ju’s poetry is not simply a natural motif or symbolic background. Rather, it is an active element that participates in the unfolding of poetic events and reconfigures the position of the human subject. In this sense, “wind” can be understood as a key poetic coordinate through which Seo’s poetic world moves from a human-centered self-understanding toward a broader reflection on relations and coexistence with the non-human.

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