Kim Kirim

Kim was born in Haksung, North Hamgyong Province. After graduating from Posung high school, he graduated from Tohoku University, following Nihon University in Japan. He returned to Korea and started his literary career, publishing "Away to the New Life" (〈가거라 새로운 생활로〉) in The Chosun Ilbo while working as a reporter in a department of art and science of the same newspaper. He also published "Problems on Poetic Techniques, Cognition, Reality, Etc" (〈시의 기술 인식 현실 등 제문제〉) in the newspaper and started his career as a literary critic. In 1933, he formed the Circle of Nine (Guinhoe, 구인회, 九人會) with Yi Sang, Lee Hyo-seok, Jo Yongman, Park Taewon, and so on. Kim began to write in earnest then, and published his first collection of poems, The Weather Chart (Gisangdo, 《기상도》, 氣象圖), in 1936. He retired to the countryside and taught English at Gyeongsung middle school (경성중학교, 鏡成中學校) near hometown until he taught Mathematics, when English was no longer taught by school. A poet Kim Gyudong was one of his students.

Kim took part in Chosun Writer's Union (조선문학가동맹, 朝鮮文學家同盟) after the liberation in 1945. The next year, he fled to the South from Soviet Union occupied North Korea. Then, he withdrew from the union around the time Republic of Korea was established in 1948. He became an assistant professor at Seoul National University, after working as a lecturer at Chung-Ang University and Yonsei University. He also founded New Culture Research Institute (신문화 연구소) around the same time. He died in North Korea, where he was kidnapped to during Korean War, but the year is unknown.

On June 9 of 1990, his fellow poets including Kim Gwang-gyun and Ku Sang erected a monument that pays a tribute to Kim at Posung high school, where Kim attended.[1]

Influenced by T.S. Eliot, Kim mainly wrote intellectualist and imagist poetry. He criticized technicalism of contemporary Korean modernist poetry and advocated "total poetry," which content and form are in balance. Because Kim was too dedicated to his theory, his earlier works were criticized for being a scatter of shattered images, but he gradually overcame it. For literary criticism, he is praised for changing Korean literary world by adopting imagism and intellectualism of Britain and the United States.

• Korean literature
• List of Korean-language poets

• Kim Kirim on Encykorea (in Korean).