This dissertation addresses how selected contemporary American poems translate the invisible presence of the Korean War, which is well known as the "Forgotten" War in the United States. This label of "forgotten" does not literally signify oblivion due to the passing of time but mirrors the American public's ignorance of the war since wartime, despite its significant repercussions on U.S. foreign policies, domestic politics, and Americans' lives during the Cold War. The memories of the war have been ill remembered and fragmented, but the effects of the war have haunted people, including those who were not on the battlefields. Selected "Forgotten" War poems thematize this haunting, embodied in various forms in different contexts and times, and demonstrate the blurred demarcations between foreign and domestic affairs, between public and personal histories, and between Same and Other.

The first chapter analyzes the connotations of the term, "forgotten," in the label of the Korean War, by exploring the "un-visible" presence of the war in American society. The second chapter discusses Korean War poems by Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, and Howard Fast, who poeticize the war's crossings of geographical and geopolitical borders in terms of gender, identity, and political stance. The third chapter addresses lesser-known war poems by Korean War soldiers whose status has been "forgotten" and erased in their home. Yet, the soldiers' poems testify to the noteworthy unrecognized memories of the war through the depiction of the ghostly haunting of the war's effects and their complicated relationships with fellow American soldiers and Asian Others on foreign soil. Finally, the fourth chapter examines Suji Kwock Kim's and Myung Mi Kim's distinct ways of remembering the "Forgotten" War as the inheritors of it in contemporary American society. The selected war poems in this dissertation eventually will direct us to (re)discover the "Forgotten" War as a lesser visible but unforgettable part of U.S. history.