The list of poems on the commemorating stone monuments at the National 4.19 Cemetery is largely filled with the mourning and ceremonial poems written by so-called purist poets, revealing the absence of Kim Suyung, Shin Dongyup, and other poets who hav...
The list of poems on the commemorating stone monuments at the National 4.19 Cemetery is largely filled with the mourning and ceremonial poems written by so-called purist poets, revealing the absence of Kim Suyung, Shin Dongyup, and other poets who have been regarded as representing the April Revolution in literary history. This paper aims to elucidate what lies behind this absence and its ideological significances. Considering that these monuments were constructed as part of the 4.19 cemetery sacredization project performed by the Kim Young Sam regime in its self-legitimizing process, such absence should be interpreted as one of the most explicit cases which reveal this regime's political limitations, that is, its complicity with the military sects of ruling groups of Korea. At least eight of the twelve engraved poems were selected among those of ceremonial mournings abundantly published in the daily papers in the victorious and ecstatic social atmosphere right after the 4.19 revolution, and the poetical quality of them are consequently not so high. Selection of these poems as representing the April revolution itself shows the workings of 'the politics of mourning', in which the present meaning of the revolution is repressed and/or erased through the post-revolutionary period dominated by authoritarian regimes. A genuine mourning in literature can be possible not by forgetting through ceremonial kinds of poems but by revitalizing the contemporary significance of the revolution which only true literary achievements can perform.