ABSTRACT
The literary genre of kasa-a lyric poem in the vernacular-was adopted by yangban (elite class) women of the later half of the Choson dynasty as their favored way for expressing their specific thoughts and feelings. Kasa are long poems with a set rhythmic pattern extended over an indefinite number of verses, ranging from two dozen lines to more than 1,000. All verses of a kasa are composed of two half-lines made up of two phrases of either three and four syllables or four and four syllables. Having no stanzaic division, kasa's relatively free form and the way it lends itself to description and realistic exposition renders the poet's inner world as well as the outer conditions of her life in a broader scope than the rigidly structured sijo, the other popular poetic form in the vernacular of the Choson dynasty. For these reasons kasa became the preferred form for women and the common people to express themselves in poetic language in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I
Kasa written by women came to be called kyubang kasa, kyujung kado, or naebang kasa, all meaning "songs of the inner chambers." People in the countryside simply call them kasa or turumari; the latter term refers to the turumari (scroll) on which they were written and then handed down through generations. Such a scroll usually had a length of five
meters, bearing just one poem. However, some extended up to forty meters, including not only several pieces of kyubang kasa, but also didactic texts in prose form or even sosolliterature as well.
