He even put to sleep the Prince of Darkness guarding the gates of Hell. Lee Keun-bae's poems have the magical properties of Orpheus' flute. His language has the double ability to awaken or to lull to sleep. We experience the creative tension of the poems in the use of a paradoxical language which puts to sleep things that are awake and wakens up things that are asleep. The early poems dealing with the devastation of the Korean War show us a world of feeling where history and nature have changed places.
War becomes rivers and flowers.
Conversely rivers and flowers become war trenches. The tints of favorite language choices demonstrate this inversion. He gives the most abstract meaning to the most concrete language, and gives the real smell of the flesh to even the most conceptual language. Artificial language and the language of nature are used in easy congruence to provide a rich feast of the imagination. This is also true of Lee Keum-bae's use of metaphor and rhythm.