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This paper analyzes Lee Seon-gwan's poetry from his debut to the early 1980s, examining the process by which he absorbed the various trends of contemporary avant-garde poetry in his own unique way and formed his own world. Despite his lifelong residence in Masan, his perspective remained sensitive to the currents of contemporary resistance poetry. Consequently, he consistently incorporated these key trends into his own work, including the poetics of Kim Soo-young, a modernist and Engaged poet in the 1960s, the Minjung poetry of Kim Ji-ha and Shin Kyung-rim in the 1970s, and the Anti-Imperialist, Unification-Oriented National Minjung Poetry of Chae Gwang-seok and Moon Byeong-ran in the 1980s. While learning from Kim Soo-young's poetics the rhetoric of sharp criticism and exposure through the deployment of avant-garde diction, he recognized the importance of Minjung poetry. While he agreed with the core tenets of Minjung poetry, emphasizing communication with readers, he pursued a somewhat different path from its norms of collective subjectivity and vision. This continued until the early 1980s, and while he did not pursue the path of embodying the class nature and prospects of labor poetry, he readily joined the mainstream currents of Anti-Imperialist, Unification-Oriented National Minjung Poetry. Simultaneously, he spent his life fighting against the social stereotypes that marginalized people with disabilities, and as a result, his independent poetic explorations sometimes led to ecological poetics. In this way, he consistently stood at the literary vanguard, striving to combat the contradictions of his time in his own unique way. In this sense, Lee Seon-gwan deserves a significant place in the history of modern Korean poetry.

This paper examined Lee Seon-gwan’s early poems related to physical disability from the perspective of affect. Affect is the force that affect and affected between bodies. Lee Seon-gwan’s early poetry represents the intense affect generated through his encounter with the Other via his body, within the existential condition of physical disability, clothed in a powerful linguistic shell. In his poetry, Lee Seon-gwan represented his disabled self as an image of deficiency. This resulted from internalizing the affect of disgust. The violence of disgust then imposed shame upon him. Shame manifested in his poetry as avoidance of others, concealment of the body, and acts of self-loathing and self-denial. He yearned for a return to the body before disability through Christian imagery of Eden and resurrection. Meanwhile, he hided in the solitude of his bedroom to escape the world’s disgust, yet longed for the world and ventured out onto the street. The street is a place where the possibility and impossibility of communication coexist. He stepped out onto the street to escape solitude, but felt even greater loneliness amidst the crowd and returned to his solitary bedroom. The affect experienced during this process was represented as negative sensations like bodily pain or coldness. Finally, he faced the reality of irreversibility and was engulfed in despair and resignation. The resulting physical reaction was represented by crying. He mentally transcended this desperate situation through the discovery of the inevitability and universality of life and death, and the reaffirmation of the imperative recognition that all humans are equal.

Lee Seon-gwan, known for his environmental poem “Doksudae” (1975), devoted his entire life to writing environmental poetry. Across five volumes of poetry, including his posthumous collection, he addressed a wide range of issues such as the Chernobyl disaster, victims of domestic and international industrial accidents, and the division of Korea. Based on the recurrent themes of ‘global consciousness’ and disability identity in his work, an analysis of his environmental poetry reveals that his ‘global consciousness’ corresponds to the concept of ‘ecology–deep ecology,’ distinct from the notions of Global or Glocal. This global consciousness is rooted and modulated in the ambivalence of ‘the global village–Masan’ where he lived (polluted modernity/community-based place), with its core principle being the “equivalence of life.” Meeting with his disability identity, this global consciousness enabled him to move beyond an early sociocultural complex over an ‘inferior body’ and to form a political and cultural identity. Here, his sense of solidarity with contemporary environmental thinkers plays an important role. The forcibly divided Korean Peninsula is one of the key sites where this global consciousness emerges. These poems draw on national and agrarian cultural motifs to express a political disability identity aimed at healing damage and recovering wholeness. In contrast, Chernobyl appears as a global village marked by barrenness produced by science and technology. Yet the poet overcomes the fear of extinction to bear witness to the suffering of ‘child’ victims of the disaster and to warn of the possibility of such a catastrophe erupting globally. In the Chernobyl cycle, this recursive structure returns once again to the children of the Korean Peninsula where he lives. Finally, his environmental poems embody his cultural disability identity as a disabled poet and primary caregiver. The practices of caregiving and writing environmental poetry together enact an ethic of care for nature, which the poet realized in his life and work.