Kim, Il-lyeop, together with Na, Hye-seok, and Kim, Myeong-soon, is one of the first modern women writers in Korea, who opened a way for women at that time to participate in the literary circles and to have their own jobs, breaking the shackles of deep-rooted, closed norms of the society. However, in spite of her leading role as a woman writer, Kim, Il-lyeop's works have not been paid serious attention to. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to investigate her poetic world that has not been fully examined. What is noticed here is that we explore various poetic features and peculiar methodological development patterns she used in her poems, with respect to ontological awareness of femininity, to imagery orientation, and to optimistic point of view discovered in her works. First, her ontological realization of femininity is reflected only suggestively in her works. Looking at her early poems in the magazine "Shinyeoja"(new women), we can perceive her sense of the times only in a comparatively abstract, somewhat vague manner, i.e. through her linking the advent of new era with an image of spring. Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning that those poems in the magazine "Shinyeoja" represent the sense of the times and the consciousness of social involvement as a woman which were absolutely pioneering at that time of the day. Since the discontinuance of issuing the magazine "Shinyeoja," Kim's works which sing praise of a new era with the rhythm of 7.5, or 4.4, faced both substantial and formal changes. Especially in the substantial part, distinguished from the earlier works to convey something enlightening, her later verses concentrate on individual emotions such as solitude, agony, re¬morse, and yearning, as well as the passion and energy of the youth. Maintaining a single poetic voice of inner monologue, her works in this period can be phrased into the following: "the rhetoric of spring flowers." Next, the image of fire in the poems of Kim, Il-lyeop displays a kind of variation: it sometimes symbolizes a hearty laughter, fire burning allover the earth, or the torch which the Budda himself lit to incite ordinary people to pursue the truth. This kind of alternation of images of fire is in close accordance with the transformation of the poet's consciousness, that is, the progress from the emphasis on social enlightenment, to immerging into the individual emotion and passion, and finally to attaining the stage of unfathomable insight and spiritual awakening through the discovery of the absolute The Other, "Nim." Lastly, the poems written after her determination to be a monk, constantly reveal her ascetic attitude in seeking for the truth, though embracing the troubles in this world. They vividly show what a person will be like after burning her youth to the ashes, and eventually realizing the essence of life, and how optimistic her point of view can be. To sum up, Kim, Il-lyeop strived to live an independent life in such a period when women were considered to be subordinate to men in their private and social lives, and also persisted to sing the praises of liberty through the construction of her own literary world. Those efforts for liberty meant an attempt to free from the oppression of Japanese colonialism, a liberal expression of woman's desires and emotions curbed under the patriarch ideology, and sometimes a search for the ontological freedom toward the eternity and the universe. Conclusively, her writings as well as her life display the poet's endeavor to persue the freedom of body and spirit in the closed society, which are expressed as a cry for enlightenment, as a clamor against the discrimination of sex, as a remorse and a monologue resulting from the disappointing reality, and finally as so hearty a laughter as to seemingly burn out all over the earth.