[5] The early poems of Kim Kwang-lim, included in his poetry collection Sorrow of a Grafted Tree (Sangsimhaneun jeommok) published by Baekjasa in 1959, overflow with the raw pain and suffering endured as a result of the Korean War.
After the armistice in 1953, Kim's poems evince a diminished attention to issues pertaining to the war or Korean society in general and a growing interest in describing phenomena, with a focus on visual imagery.
Kim thus eliminated all abstraction from his works, and sought an aesthetic that would isolate the image and remove all external semantic associations from it.
[6] Kim was essentially an imagist and his poems often seem like quick glimpses of life in which human concern meets with tight poetic control.
While Kim was cognizant of the role of materialism in modern society, his poetry seeks to overcome this with tolerance and forgiveness.