A Comparative Study on the Archetypical Substances of Departing in Walt Whitman's and Shin, Kyung-Lim's Poems Yoon, Chang-Sik(Chodang University) This study is to make parallel analogies and differences between two poets clear by a comparative analysis of the archetypical substances of ‘departing' motif in Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass(1855) and Shin, Kyung-Lim's Street (1990) and Horn (2002). The ‘dynamism of departing' always has been generated in Whitman's and Shin's poems. Even if their poetic selves depart from the daily lives and homelands to meet the true and the immortal world, the process to metamorphose their selves and the substances of that desire is different from each other. While Whitman's self set dynamic and lively centrifugal sails from the lands to sea shores and from the shores onto the sea, Shin's self departed homeland immanent in the centripetal recurrence. As Whitman had a mythical disposition to recognize the spirit and body, good and evil as a unity(unio mystica), it was true that some religionists and critics devaluated his poetic meanings. But the will to sublimate his self onto higher phase melted in the Leaves of Grass surpassed the narrow social conformities and ethical measures. Although he presaged and faced the nihilistic death like bubble through the 'last of ebb', a poetic symbol, he represented the possibility and belief that his self would be able to overcome the wave of death eventually. Although 'the negative phases of departing homeland' was shadowed in Shin's poems in 1970's and 1980's, the sharpened ideological persistence of the personal pains and political-social injustice in the later poems in Horn was decolorized to a considerable extent. Eventually, poetic selves in the later poems surpassed and overcame the limit of a single-tracked 'departing and returning'. They were on the streets like “a special privileged postman of the remote post office” in order to seek the entity left in departing and ‘the not-being'. He dreamed of restoring the ‘the matrix of self' of his archetypical figure. Thus, the eventual aim of this comparative study is to contribute to preparing for a step-stone of mutual understanding and exchange between American and Korean literature by broadening an interpretative and critical horizon of poetry in two counties.