in the 1970s, kim's poetry began to incorporate elements of seon buddhism, crowning the poet's endeavor to eliminate prosaic elements and abstraction from his poetry and to isolate the bare, unobstructed image. kim's fixation on realizing the perfect poetic depiction of an image and establishing a profound awareness of this image elevated his work and language to a new, transcendental plane. in fact, underlying his works is the development of a new poetic sensibility vis-a-vis external phenomena, the realization of the lucidity of language, and the creation of poetic expression through the construction of the image. following the publication of "bird made of language" ("eoneoro mandeun sae") in 1979, kim rekindled his efforts to breach the limits of language and to stretch it to its extremes, through radical simplification of language by self-restraint akin to the practices of seon or zen buddhism.