Baek Seok

Baek Seok (born Paek Ki-haeng; July 1, 1912 - January 7, 1996) was a Korean poet.

Baek Seok was born named Baek Ki-haeng in Chongju, North Pyongan on 1 July 1912, the son of Baek Si-bak (백시박, 白時璞) and Lee Bong-woo (李鳳宇).

His father worked at Chosun Ilbo as a photographer.

Baek Si-bak was not wealthy, but he participated in raising building funds for Osan school.

Lee Bong-woo was known as a neat and good cook.

His real name is Baek Ki-haeng, and his nickname is Baek Ki-yeon (백기연, 白夔衍) in 1915.

In 1918, Baek Seok entered Osan elementary school (founded in 1907) and his brother, Hyeob-haeng, was born.

In 1919 Osan school was entirely burned down by Japanese military police for reasons that led to the March 1st Movement.

Cho Man-sik, who was the principal of Osan school, was arrested and the school had to be closed for a year and a half.

In 1924, Baek graduated from Osan elementary school and entered Osan middle and high school.

He admired Kim So-wol, who was six years his senior, and got interested in literature.

He was a top-scoring student, but he could not enter university because of financial difficulties.

In January 1930, he won the first prize with his first novel The Mother and Son (그 모와 아들) in a literary contest hosted by Chosun Ilbo.

That made him able to study at Aoyama Gakuin University with a scholarship funded by Chosun Ilbo.

In university, he majored in English Literature and also studied French and Russian.

Studying abroad, he enjoyed poems of Japanese poet Takuboku Ishikawa and was interested in modernism.

He was born in Chŏngju in North Pyongan, and started his journalist career at Chosun Ilbo in 1934.

In 1934, he entered Chosun Ilbo publishing department, having graduated from the university.

He edited a sister magazine Feminine (여성, Yeoseong) and translated foreign works and papers.

He started to work officially as a writer and a translator releasing an essay "Earrings" (이설 귀고리, Iseol Guigori) on 16 May 1934.

Translating D. S. Mirsky's paper made him think about how valuable the Korean language is and how to preserve it with poetry.

He published his first poem "Chŏngju Fortress" (정주성, Jeongjuseong) on 31 August 1935 issue of Chosun Ilbo.

On January 20 next year, he published a collection of the poems he had written entitled Deer (사슴, Sasŭm).

Even though Deer contained 33 poems, many of which were new, seven of them were already published in magazines or newspapers in slightly different forms.

On 31 August 1935, he made public his first poem "Chongju Fortress".

On 20 January 1936, he published at his own expense a collection of his poems entitled Deer which was a limited edition of 100.

Deer consisted of seven poems which were already published and the others new.

On 29 January, a gathering to commemorate the publication of Deer was held at Taeseogwan and eleven people including Kim Kirim and Shin Hyun-jung got involved as proposers.

This year, he resigned from the company and started for his new post as an English teacher in Yeongsaeng high school in Hamhung.

In Hamhung, he fell in love with Kim Jin-hyang, a kisaeng, and named her Jaya.

In 1938, he proposed to her that they leave for Manchuria and live free there.

But, she refused proposal fearing that she would stand in his way.

She left for Gyeongseong alone.

After the defeat of the Japanese Empire in 1945 and the liberation of Korea, he changed his name to Baek Seok, and his main residence was Suwon.

The name Seok is known to have been used because he loved the beginning of Takuboku Ishikawa, a Japanese poet.

Until 1948, he published about 60 more pieces, but is not believed to have produced another poetry book.

In South Korea, the publication of his works was strictly prohibited for a while because he was labelled as a North Korean poet and a communist.

However, since 1987 when a collection of his works (poems and essays) were first introduced after the Korean War, he has been widely re-evaluated by scholars and critics.

He is now regarded as having opened a new face of Korean socialist modernism with a group of literary writers.

In 2007, he was listed by the Korean Poets' Association among the ten most important modern Korean poets.