This essay analyzes T. Shevchenko’s Haidamaky (1841) and Shin Dongyup’s Geum Gang (1967) from the perspective of cultural history, focusing on the preservation of collective memory through oral tradition and its culmination in historical poems. The two narrative poems have similar features: the historical meaning of the sujetevent, the structure of the poem, the character of the protagonists, and the way in which the memory of the people is fixed in poems. Both poems claim to be based on collective memories transmitted by the elder generation to the younger. Household and village storytelling, and songs of itinerant people, contribute to spreading the memory of historical events and to consolidating national consciousness. Historical poems serve as a mediator of collective memory and written history by transmitting the people’s memory in textualized form to future generations. With reference to these examples, we can reconsider the question of the making of nations and of national consciousness.