Korea's Forgotten Poets: Resistance in Verse

Lucas: We’ve spent a lot of time lately looking at the steel mills of Ulsan, the concrete of the DMZ, and the political coups that carved out the South Korean state, but there is another kind of architecture that held the country together when the government fell apart. I want to talk about the poets and writers of the Japanese colonial period and the immediate post-war years, because their work wasn't just art—it was a form of underground survival. When public political assembly was banned and the Korean language itself was being suppressed in schools, the written word became one of the last safe harbors for national identity. Luna: So they were basically preserving the culture through metaphor? Lucas: Exactly, and it was incredibly dangerous work. Take Yi Sang, for instance, a figure who is almost mythical in Korean literary circles today. Born Kim Hae-gyeong, he adopted the pseudonym Yi Sang, which means 'self' or 'individuality,' a radical concept in a society that demanded total conformity to the Imperial Japanese state. His most famous work, a collection of short stories and prose poems called The Wings, uses surreal, fragmented imagery to depict the suffocating feeling of living under occupation, where the self is literally trying to grow wings to escape a body that feels like a cage. Luna: That sounds incredibly heavy, especially for someone so young. Lucas: He died at only thirty-three from tuberculosis, exacerbated by the stress and malnutrition of the times, but his influence on modern Korean thought is immense. He represented a kind of intellectual resistance that didn't shout, but rather dissected the psyche of the occupied subject. But while Yi Sang was exploring the interior landscape of despair, another poet was giving voice to the collective grief of the rural poor, who made up the vast majority of the population. Luna: I remember hearing about Kim Sowol before. Lucas: Kim Sowol is perhaps the most beloved poet in Korea, known primarily for his cycle of poems titled The Arrow Flower. Written in the 1920s, these poems use traditional Korean folk song structures, or gasa, to express a deep, almost universal sorrow. The central poem, Arirang, tells the story of a woman waiting for her lover, using the mountain pass of Arirang as a symbol of separation and longing. On the surface, it’s a love song, but for listeners under the colonial regime, it was clearly an allegory for the separation of the Korean people from their own land and sovereignty. Luna: It’s fascinating how they could hide politics in plain sight. Lucas: They had to be masters of ambiguity. If you wrote too openly, you were arrested or disappeared. Kim Sowol himself lived a relatively quiet life, working as a teacher, but his poetry resonated with such emotional honesty that it became a touchstone for ordinary people. It wasn't just about romance; it was about the pain of displacement and the endurance of the Korean spirit. This tradition of using folklore and nature to encode political meaning continued into the mid-century, even as the country moved toward independence. Luna: Did this literary resistance help fuel the later democratic movements? Lucas: Absolutely. You have to see the continuity between these colonial-era writers and the activists of the 1970s and 80s. One key bridge figure is Han Yong-un, a Buddhist monk and poet who was a major leader in the March First Movement of 1919, the massive uprising against Japanese rule. He wasn't just writing poetry; he was organizing, and his poetic vision of a harmonious, independent Korea based on Buddhist ethics of compassion and equality deeply influenced the intellectual climate that would later support the democratization efforts. Luna: I didn't realize Buddhism played such a big role in that. Lucas: It’s easy to forget because modern South Korea is so heavily Christian and secular in its political discourse, but Han Yong-un and other religious intellectuals saw non-violent resistance as a moral imperative. After the war and the division of the peninsula, many of these poets either went North or stayed in the South, navigating the complex politics of the Cold War. In the South, under authoritarian regimes, poetry again became a site of resistance, with poets like Kim Chi-ha later on using their work to critique military dictatorship. Luna: So the pen really was fighting alongside the protests. Lucas: In many ways, yes. The cultural memory preserved by these writers provided the vocabulary for dissent. When students took to the streets in Gwanghwamun Square in the 1980s, they were drawing on a lineage of expression that started with Yi Sang and Kim Sowol. It reminds us that the 'Miracle on the Han River' wasn't just about GDP growth; it was built on a foundation of people who refused to let their culture be erased, even when they had no power to change the government. Luna: It puts a very human face on all that economic data. Lucas: It does. And it shows that resilience isn't always loud. Sometimes it’s the quiet persistence of a rhyme, or a surreal image of wings, kept alive in secret notebooks and whispered among friends. If today was actually useful to you, the way these stay ad-free is listener support — buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo — that's F. E. X. I. N. G. O. Luna: Yeah, supporting the deep dives is really worth it. Lucas: Thanks for listening. 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