This study aims to comparatively examine the poetic worlds of Garam Lee Byeong-gi (李秉岐, 1891–1968) and Tản Đà Nguyễn Khắc Hiếu (阮克孝, 1889–1939) as oriented toward authentic sensation (實感) and authentic sentiment (實情).
Garam and Tản Đà were representative poets of the modern transitional period who, living under Japanese colonial rule and French colonialism respectively, wrote poetry in their native languages in traditional literary forms while bearing the identity of subjects of occupied nations. For both poets, the choice to write in their vernacular languages was not merely a linguistic preference but an act of cultural resistance - a practice of preserving national cultural identity under the conditions of colonial subjugation. The twin orientations of authentic sensation and authentic sentiment, which Garam articulated in his essay "Let Us Reform Sijo" (｢시조는 혁신하자｣) as the foremost principle of sijo composition - namely, the expression of urgent emotion and lived experience through subjective lyricism and concrete sensory perception - can be identified as equally operative in the poetry of Tản Đà.
This paper analyzes and compares the dimensions in which both poets' orientations toward authentic sensation and authentic sentiment are most distinctly manifest across three aspects. First, in travel poetry, both Garam and Tản Đà represent the national landscape through direct personal journeys; however, Garam engages in a deep, concentrated exploration of the natural environment, history, and topography of specific locales, whereas Tản Đà offers a broader, more expansive rendering of multiple regions organized around the axes of taste, aesthetic delight, and personal memory. Second, in their poetic treatment of family members and acquaintances, both poets share a tendency to foreground candid relational emotion over didactic messaging; yet Garam concentrates on familial bonds, giving voice to the unspoken suffering of his mother and wife and thereby turning inward toward introspection, while Tản Đà externalizes emotions arising from his relationships with those around him, seeking to communicate and share those feelings with a wider readership. Third, in their respective responses to colonial reality, both poets similarly choose to illuminate that reality through poetry rather than through direct resistance; nevertheless, Garam's approach proceeds from an interiorized standpoint grounded in the concrete experience of imprisonment, from which he reflects on reality and issues cautionary warnings to others, whereas Tản Đà employs public media - newspapers and magazines - as his platform, directing pointed questions outward toward contemporaries and toward the age itself.
This comparative examination seeks to illuminate the ways in which genre, historical particularity, and medium have left their distinct imprints on poetic practice within the shared axis of authentic sensation and authentic sentiment characteristic of transitional-period literature. In so doing, it aims to contribute to the mutual understanding of Korean and Vietnamese modern literatures and to advance a comparative literary approach between the two traditions.