Abstract

The study aims to analyze correlation between the passage from melancholy to mourning with the symbolic in Cheon, Yang-hee's early poetry. The first collection of poems of Cheon, Yang-hee filled with images of sense of pain, screams, and body torn in piece short, incomplete sentences, and confusions of communication between speaker and hearer. That is the symptom of crisis in the symbolic, which controls order of language and coherence of subject. In the second collection of poems, the poetic diction is changed. Sentences become stable and logic, speculation is appeared instead of violent emotions, and poetic techniques like metaphor and repetition make expression poetry itself, As ‘Seoul’, city-life and the others become appeared, in a dimension of semantics. Through mediation the symbolic, the subject who have fallen in auto-eroticism makes a relation with the others to be a subject, and to get out of melancholy. But in this stage, the subject have to bear a burden of position of absence place in the symbolic. In the third collection of poems, there are another change. These poetry are concerned about history and society without any private emotion, expressed by pun, wordplay, and parody which play of the signifiant is considered more important than signification. The subject of mourning make his way to poetic subject by identification with position of empty in the symbolic.